Schenectady Synecdoche

Much of what has traditionally been classified as "plagiarism" and thus as "academic dishonesty" is neither an immoral act nor a failure to cite sources correctly. Rather, patchwriting (copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes) represents a writer's attempt to understand a challenging source text and master its language. Pedagogy can help writers through the process, towards improved strategies for reading and writing about sources.

Students need to know whether they can use visual sources created by others; how to cite them; and whether it is ethical to alter them. Students who create their own images and circulate them online need to consider whether to copyright their work or to assign a Creative Commons license to it. This workshop overviews these two sets of issues; offers pedagogical suggestions; and engages faculty in the creation and revision of assignments that draw students into responsible creation and appropriation of visual sources.

Textual standards vary from one culture to another. As English solidifies its role as the global language, its textual standards are becoming the norm. The problems that this creates for international students are important for U.S. faculty to understand. That understanding in turn suggests ways whereby faculty can adopt a developmental approach to all students' use of sources.

In the same year that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act were passed, Turnitin.com emerged as a commercially successful response to educators' concerns about students' plagiarism. These three phenomena characterize an era of culture-wide anxiety about the misappropriation of text. Typically, these concerns are expressed in ethical terms and are enacted in stricter, more rigorously enforced laws and regulations. In addition to these concerns about individual ethics, educators need to attend to the interaction of plagiarism and education: the ways in which acts of plagiarism undermine the learning that is supposed to result from education; and the ways in which incidents of plagiarism can point to curricular revisions that can result in better teaching.

Every writer struggles with the task of writing about sources that are difficult to comprehend. Typically, inexperienced writers "patchwrite" from these sources, borrowing language from the source--sometimes with source attribution, sometimes not. This workshop describes patchwriting not as a criminal act of academic dishonesty but as a sign of the writer's struggle with a challenging source text. We will explore methods for teaching students to write from sources, as well as methods for teachers to differentiate acts of academic dishonesty from sincere attempts to engage source texts.

A few short years ago, the research paper was a staple of college curricula. Instructors assigned papers; students conducted a library search for sources and read some of what they found; they wrote up a report of or argument from those sources; and they quoted from and cited the texts. Now, however, educators are reporting a reluctance to assign research papers, because of a perceived flood of internet plagiarism. What is needed in response to concerns about plagiarism is a renewed commitment to teaching research. Students need to learn how to find sources in the library and online; how to evaluate them; how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from them; and how to cite their sources. If we are to have a literate populace capable of making informed decisions, educators today need to teach critical information literacy and ethical use of sources.

This workshop begins by describing an appropriate and useful protocol for contemporary research assignments: choosing a single topic for the entire class to research; collaborative exploration of that topic; and then students' choice of focused subtopics for individual research. Workshop participants explore possible applications and adaptations of this protocol for research assignments in their own classes.

Complicating educators' concerns about "internet plagiarism" is the problem of low levels of information literacy. With the advent of the internet, we are suddenly experiencing a culture-wide crisis in information literacy. Many students know how to find sources on the open internet but do not know how to evaluate them nor how to access the "hidden internet." Many instructors are adept at evaluating traditional print sources but are less certain about online sources; and they, too, often lack facility with research on the hidden internet. The result can be widespread plagiarism and widespread suspicion of students' online research. While taking into account the workload issues that instructors must manage, this workshop offers guidelines for instructors to develop their own online information literacy and to communicate it with--or collaboratively build it with--their students.