Schenectady Synecdoche

« Sago film | Main | Blogevent »

September 15, 2006

Valentine, Kathryn. "Plagiarism as Literacy Practice: Recognizing and Rethinking Ethical Binaries." College Composition and Communication 58.1 (Sept. 2006): 89-109.

Reading notes from a heartening article:

"[P]lagiarism is a literacy practice; plagiarism is something that people do with reading and writing" (89). A textual act becomes plagiarism as a result of interactions between readers and writers, and those interactions occur within specific contexts (89-90). "[T]he work of negotiating plagiarism is also the work of negotiating identity for students" (90).

When academic integrity codes categorize plagiarism as academic dishonesty and prescribe rule-bound behaviors as the antidote or preventative, they legislate what Zygmunt Bauman calls an "ethical morality . . . in which morality is a state of being that can be achieved by rule following rather than by deciding and then acting on what one believes to be good in a given situation. In an ethical morality, individuals have no moral responsibility; they are only responsible for following ethical rules" (92). Avoiding plagiarism, however, is accomplished not by following rules but by gaining experience with context-bound textual practices (93). Hence teaching about plagiarism must begin not at the level of text but at the level of discourse—acquiring new discourse, situating oneself in a new discursive context, and taking on a new identity (104-105). Students need to assume ethical positions not by following rules but by attending to discursive contexts and understanding how they can assume ethical identities in those contexts (106).

It is not enough for composition instruction to engage students in a developmental process of writing from sources; it must also address the issues of identity formation that are imbedded in those practices (93). Ethical discourses of plagiarism hinder that task (94). The adjudication of plagiarism regulates students' identity by encouraging students to confess to their transgressions, and it regulates the identify of professors and the institution by marking their concern with textual ethics (102).

Plagiarism is represented as an avoidance of work (95), and that, too, warrants punishment (95-96). Valentine sees this calculus as the cause of instructors' sense of outrage when they encounter plagiarism, and she interprets patchwriting as a form of labor (96). "Students’ opportunities to practice citation and the performance of honesty are closed down when their improper citation is read as a sign of dishonesty, rather than as a sign of an authentic beginner engaged in the work of acquiring a new discourse" (97).

Valentine illustrates her claims through a case study of Lin, an international graduate student who was accused of plagiarism in a course outside his field of study and who then worked with a writing center consultant (98). Valentine narrates the judicial process that Lin experienced (99). He was given an "F" in the course (100).

We compositionists should "continue to deepen our understanding of plagiarism as a literacy practice, and while doing so, we can also recognize that we are situated in a network of competing discourses. In this context, it is not enough for students to be taught the 'rules' and 'mechanics' of citation. Instead, they need to be taught the significance of citation for their identity as honest students (if they are going avoid plagiarism) and how to read the con- text (which defines when it is necessary to cite and what will count as citation) in which they are working" (105).

Good stuff. The world needs more scholarship such as this. Critical mass is one key, and this article contributes to that critical mass. Then what's needed is to communicate these ideas persuasively to a larger audience.

It's painful to read the account of Lin, and to realize that if Lin's institution had embraced the WPA recommendations, he could have learned "proper" contemporary US citation practices without having failed the course and been branded a cheater. The institutionally sanctioned branding and exclusion of hard-working, ethical students is a brutal practice that I hope one day will be regarded with amazement, much as Jim Crow laws are today.

And finally, I have to wonder whether Valentine "got into" the topic of plagiarism as I did, through a troubling encounter with it.

Posted by senioritis at September 15, 2006 09:19 PM

Comments

Posted by: Donna at September 15, 2006 10:59 PM