RECONCEPTUALIZING AUTHORSHIP:
THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF PLAGIARISM AND DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES
FOR FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION INSTRUCTION
Leslie R. Anglesey
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2009
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
(Composition)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
FALL
2011
RECONCEPTUALIZING AUTHORSHIP:
THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF PLAGIARISM AND DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES
FOR FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION INSTRUCTION
A Thesis
by
Leslie R. Anglesey
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Fiona Glade, PhD
__________________________________, Second Reader
Daniel Melzer, PhD
____________________________
Date
ii
Student: Leslie R. Anglesey
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
David Toise, PhD
Department of English
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
RECONCEPTUALIZING AUTHORSHIP:
THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF PLAGIARISM AND DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES
FOR FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION INSTRUCTION
by
Leslie R. Anglesey
In recent years, issues of academic honesty, including student plagiarism, have
become hot topics among university faculty. Many universities are trying various
techniques and tools such as plagiarism-detection software in order to curtail what some
describe as an explosion of instances of plagiarism at the university level. This thesis will
explore current scholarship and data on plagiarism to determine to what extent this
general belief is true. Additionally, for this project, I requested that first-year composition
instructors complete a short questionnaire regarding their attitudes toward plagiarism
within the context of English 1A, and I analyzed these responses along with other
classroom materials submitted by instructors. Through my analysis of the data provided
by first-year composition instructors, I have determined key areas of first-year
composition classrooms that can be improved upon in order to provide a more ethical and
complex approach to plagiarism. By treating plagiarism as an ethical concern of writing
that is dependent upon the discourse community in which the writer is writing, first-year
composition instructors can better prepare students to write as members of academic
discourse communities.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Fiona Glade, PhD
_______________________
Date
iv
DEDICATION
I would like to dedicate this work to my family, whose love and support has
taught me to believe in my dreams, and to have the courage to see them through.
To my dad, for teaching me that with hard work and determination, anything is
possible. To my mother, for her unconditional love, support, and smiles; and to my
siblings, whose friendship has made life during graduate school bearable.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to Carson and Jacob for giving me
innumerable reasons to stop, smile, and enjoy life.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe my deepest respect and gratitude to my faculty advisors for providing me
with so much time, assistance, and guidance through this process. This work would not
be possible without the dedication of Dr. Fiona Glade, whose commitment as a mentor
and scholar has inspired me to learn and grow throughout this process. Thank you for the
thousands of problem-posing questions, and for always expecting me to rise to the
occasion. This has brought me to previously unimagined heights as a student, teacher,
and scholar.
I would also like to thank Dr. Daniel Melzer for his time and patience with me
during this process. I am grateful for the privilege of your mentorship and for the
invaluable insight you provided throughout this process.
Finally, I would also like to express my gratitude to the faculty members of the
English Department at CSUS for their participation in my research, without which this
thesis would not be possible.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ................................................................................................................................. v
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... vi
List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... viii
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION ……………...……………………………………………………….. 1
2. LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................. 15
3. RESEARCH FINDINGS .................................................................................................. 56
4. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ........................................................... 90
Appendix A. Research Informed Consent………………..…………………………...114
Appendix B. Instructor Questionnaire…………………..…………………………………116
Appendix C. Interview Questions……………………………………….………………118
Appendix D. Ways of Incorporating the Way of Ethics into First-Year
Composition …………..…………………………………………......120
Appendix E. Guidelines for Reading & Writing Assignments in First-Year
Composition ………………………………………………………..123
Works Cited ......................................................................................................................
vii
125
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 3.1. What Methods Do You Utilize When Teaching Students About
Plagiarism?…………………………………………………………………………… 85
Figure 3.2. On a Scale of 1-5, How Important Is It To You That Students Are Presented With
Instruction Regarding Plagiarism in English 1A?................................................................... 86
viii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Even though compositionists may today espouse a social democratic rhetoric, they
continue to do the work of liberal culture—the work of protecting a hierarchical status
quo—when they criminalize patchwriting in their pedagogy. –Rebecca Moore Howard
Introduction
When I began working on this project some time ago, I was excited to share it
with friends and family who have supported me throughout my education. However, after
talking with many people about my topic, I began to notice a pattern in the reactions of
friends and family who are (and most likely will remain) unacquainted with current
topics and theory in composition studies. The conversations would begin politely enough;
they would ask something like so, what are you writing about, to which I would reply
with my one-word answer and prepare to give a quick synopsis of the topic in general. As
soon as I got out that one word — plagiarism — I noticed two general trends in responses
from my once-captive audiences: either (a) their eyes would begin to glaze over in
spontaneous boredom or (b) my friends would inform me that it was a poor topic.
This latter response intrigued me more than the boredom. It seems that (from my
informal research and observations on this phenomenon) almost everyone has a
preconceived, and strongly held, idea about plagiarism—what it is and what to do about
it. The more I talked to these people, the more convinced I became that we, as a
collective society, need to engage in more dialogue about plagiarism and academic
2
honesty, both in the university and in the many professions, vocations, and discourse
communities at large. We can find evidence of the American cultural obsession with
ownership and plagiarism in many arenas. Courthouses are filling with litigation related
to intellectual property at an ever-increasing rate, and patent and trademark applications
are continually submitted, both of which can be seen as indicators of a society that values
distinguishing something (an idea, a product, a formula) as being mine versus that same
thing being yours. The best way to begin this work is by discussing first and foremost
why we need to talk more about plagiarism in general.
In general, we can define the Western or American attitude toward plagiarism by
foregrounding it with American conceptualization of intellectual property. Carol Peterson
Haviland and Joan A. Mullin, editors of Who Owns This Text?, a collection of essays
detailing their three-year interdisciplinary interview project on plagiarism across the
curriculum, suggest that the term intellectual property is rooted in Western copyright
laws and encompasses an individual’s right to own and control the dissemination of the
products they produce (2). The rights of authors and individuals to own and control their
creative works were key to the development of the United States, as evidenced by the
inclusion of Article I, Section 8, Number 8 in the U.S. Constitution, which states that:
The Congress shall have power: To promote the progress of science and
useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries (qtd. in DeVoss
204)
3
Hence, the tradition of owning tangible products, including written works, is inextricably
connected to the American identity, as well as the culture of American academics. This is
an important element to consider when contextualizing plagiarism within the American
culture at large, and within the culture of the academic discourse communities, because it
reifies the notion that the power to possess is innately part of the American psyche. Over
the course of time, however, the definition of what a person can own has become more
convoluted. Today, intellectual property includes not just tangible products such as
books, technological gadgets, and art; it encompasses the intangible such as music,
computer programming and coding, and works (and words) not printed (such as Internet
websites and blogs). As a new digital age has blossomed, yet it has also continued to
carry the old regime of ownership. No longer do we just speak of someone committing
‘plagiarism,’ but our society has created an entirely new vocabulary to describe the theft
of digital works. Today, for example, we can speak of “digital piracy,” (Al-Rafee &
Cronan 237-238) or the act of illegally sharing music, movies, and other intangible works
that are protected under expanding copyright laws. This trend suggests that the Romantic
conceptualization of authorship—which I will discuss in depth in the next section—
lingers within our society, despite opposing efforts to democratize the dissemination of
all texts—written and visual. On the other hand, other media developments such as
Youtube demonstrate a conflicting attitude toward authorship, and serve as a space where
competing forces meet. It is in this form of media that some individuals attempt to
disseminate media footage from television and other sources, while others attempt to
4
expand copyright laws to include these new forms of texts (Hilderbrand 48). Because
students now enter the university armed with an awareness (albeit oftentimes
unarticulated) of the cultural definition of authorship, and beliefs about what can be
shared, borrowed, and reutilized, it is no wonder that conflicts exist between the
expectations of the academy and the expectations of students—which will be elaborated
on later.
Most of the people that I would begin to talk to about plagiarism demonstrated a
basic conceptualization of it. One friend, a career high school English teacher, scoffed at
my allegedly radical notions on plagiarism. For her, the issue of plagiarism is an openand-closed concept: students will attempt to cheat by stealing papers off of the internet,
or they will try to turn in their friends’ work as their own. Her final remarks were words
of caution to me that, since I was only an inexperienced teacher, someday I would
understand this. Other friends, such as fellow students, were convinced that I had over
thought the issue, and they were sure I was attempting to make a mountain out of a mole
hill.
Individual Ownership versus Collective Co-Ownership
The Western notion of plagiarism is largely connected to our history with
copyright and can be described as the act of trying to proffer someone else’s work or
words as one’s own. One of the many factors that influence the Western notion of
plagiarism is the obsession with owning, trademarking, and generally controlling the
dissemination of anything we believe to be the unique creation of our own genius. The
5
roots of this attitude can be traced back to the Romantic poets who, according to Martha
Woodmansee, argued that “genuine authorship is originary in the sense that it results not
in a variation, an imitation, or an adaptation…but in an utterly new, unique—in a word,
‘original’—work” (3, author’s emphasis). In other words, the Romantics believed that
they could create a text that was completely and utterly of their own creation and that was
attributable to no other. This would mean that Keats or Wordsworth could sit, meditate
and somehow turn off all of their other texts, voices and influences that might interfere
with the creation of his writing.
Individualism and originality also became essential characteristics of American
Romanticism as authors and philosophers sought to establish a “cultural identity” apart
from those identities brought by immigrants to the new nation (Spiller 346). St. Jean de
Crèvecoeur observed in 1782 that “‘the American is a new man, who acts upon new
principles’” (qtd. in Spiller 350). This self-assurance of the American Romantics that the
country was comprised of singular men who were separate and distinguishable from all
others in their beliefs, abilities and even in their ownership has bled into all aspects of
contemporary American society. We can even see evidence of Crèvecoeur’s new man in
American universities where instructors push students to engage with sources and still
create something new. While this aspect of the university education has many positive
influences on the development of those who attend college, some negative influences can
be detected when we consider how the Romantic fashioning of authorship influences
student writing.
6
Despite the adherence of the Romantics (both British and US), and even the
Founding Fathers, to the ownership of intellectual property, Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault have since declared the death or the end of the solitary Author (intentionally
capitalized), stating that such a concept is a fiction that no longer holds true. Roland
Barthes, for example, adamantly states that any text is nothing more than a “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
A tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). This
configuration of a text is in direct opposition to the Romantic view. When Barthes’
notion of a text is adopted, it necessarily follows that other issues, such as who is an
author, and what is academic honesty, are complicated as well.
Barthes’ revolutionary concept was later echoed by Michel Foucault in his essay
“What is an Author?” Foucault asserts that when discussing what is considered to be the
work or works of an author, one cannot encapsulate what the work might include, for
“the word ‘work’ and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status
of the author’s individuality” (“Who Is” 144). This complication is born out of Foucault’s
conclusion that an author’s work cannot be defined “amid the millions of traces left by
someone after his death” (“Who Is” 144). This implies there is a connection between all
written texts and consumers of such texts. In other words, I cannot always distinguish
what ideas may be mine (in the Western notion of the word), or whether the inception of
my ideas was first born in the work of an author I read. Thus, the boundaries between any
given reader and any given writer cannot always be fenced off, as if the ideas of the mind
7
could be delineated as property can be by boundary lines. I am asserting rather, that
(following the lead of Foucault and Barthes) it is merely a fiction to believe we can
isolate ourselves amidst the great concourse of voices that intrude upon our thoughts on a
daily basis.
American society outside the university, however, has not been able to develop
past the image of the original author. We can see evidence of this today in court cases.
J.K. Rowling, the author of the widely acclaimed (and wildly successful) Harry Potter
novels had a suit brought against her by another author, Nancy Stouffer, which contained
accusations of plagiarism1. In January 2011, the suit was dismissed by a federal court
judge, but this nonetheless demonstrates that the roots of intellectual property and
plagiarism are still very much part of the American consciousness. Such cases reveal that,
despite Barthes’ and Foucault’s work, there exist today groups of people who staunchly
hold to the notion that the works of their own genius are distinguishable from those
created by others, and that the genius of one individual can be infringed upon by another.
Plagiarism scandals are found in many other realms of contemporary society.
During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made accusations against nowPresident Barak Obama of plagiarizing another Democratic politician’s speech in 2006.
After the Clinton campaign’s allegations, President Obama later admitted that he should
have given fellow Democrat Deval Patrick credit for the words, but did not believe he
1
This is not the only case of plagiarism brought against J.K. Rowling. The estate of a deceased
British author, Adrian Jacobs, has claimed that Rowling stole ideas from Jacob’s novel The Adventures of
Willy the Wizard. This suit was dismissed by the Court in early 2011.
8
had committed plagiarism (Zeleny). While it may be asserted that Clinton’s allegations
were less about intellectual property and more about raising a scandal, the rhetoric of
both parties reveals important attitudes towards plagiarism that exist today. News reports
on the scandal indicate that Mr. Obama and Mr. Patrick were close friends who “‘share
ideas all the time’” (Zeleny). The assertion by President Obama’s that collaboration
negates any accusations of plagiarism seems to create exclusions to the plagiarism rule
which are often not permitted to students on the university campus.2
The works of Barthes and Foucault have been reinforced by social constructivism,
which argues to overthrow the Romantic notion of the autonomous Author-God, instead
insisting that writers (professional or novice) cannot easily separate what words in a text
are “theirs” and which they have acquired by reading or studying other texts. James Paul
Gee has stated that the movement of sociohistorical psychology, for example, which
follows both Vygotsky and Bakhtin, argues that thinking and writing are not “‘private,’
but almost always mediated by ‘cultural tools,’ that is, artefacts, symbols, tools,
technologies, and forms of language” (181). In other words, our thinking and our writing
will always consist of an amalgamation of our own thoughts and the words and thoughts
of others participating in the written and oral conversations that surround writers every
day.
2
Student identities regarding plagiarism will discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
9
Plagiarism in the University
While contemporary society continues to grapple with whether authors,
politicians, and others can own their words and ideas, composition scholars continue to
explore the fallacies of the Author-God within the university setting. Rebecca Moore
Howard has echoed this analysis in asserting that the Romantic fashioning of the author
can still be found at the university. According to Moore Howard:
Contemporary scholarship asserts that the premises upon which the
modern notion of plagiarism is based—the premises that a writer can and
should be autonomous and original, and that as a result the writer can also
be deemed moral and should be accorded ownership of his or her
writing—are a fiction, produced by and for a capitalistic, patriarchal
society. (Standing 15)
The fallacy of the Author-God, of the lone genius working in solitude, is perpetuated by a
culture that sponsors the ability to own, to hold as one’s own, any given idea. Such an
attitude is inextricably connected with the hierarchies of patriarchal societies that create
binaries in which identities are favored as morally good (the genius Author-God) or
demonized (the plagiarizer). What this binary fails to account for are the many different
identities that can be attributed to students who commit acts synonymous with
plagiarism. Referring back to the example of Hillary Clinton’s accusations against Barak
Obama, President Obama asserted that a third identity can exist—the collaborator.
Unfortunately, such varied identities do not exist for students.
10
The academic honesty policies at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS)
are a reflection of the broader Western attitudes toward plagiarism and authorship, rather
than a reflection of Barthes and Foucault’s work. CSUS is a four year, comprehensive
public university located in Sacramento, California. It is important to look closely at how
the pervasive binary of student identities directly affects university classrooms, and
specifically, CSUS students. In today’s digital world there are unlimited contact zones
where writers and readers regularly share ideas and information. From online forums to
hypertexts, these technological developments all beg the same questions—what
implications arise in terms of citation and plagiarism? How can students utilize the
wealth of digitized information while still complying with policies and practices that are
inflexible? The policies that are promulgated through CSUS do not accommodate for the
many situations from which claims of plagiarism may arise. For example, as will be
discussed further, the policies do not (and, as structured, cannot) account for the ethical
question of whether students should cite the advice or ideas they receive from an
anonymous user of an online forum, from peer workshops or from other collaborative
sources.
Plagiarism in the Classroom
Lester Faigley has pointed to a paradox located in composition classrooms in
observing the following:
Where composition studies has proven least receptive to postmodern
theory is in surrendering its belief in the writer as an autonomous self,
11
even at a time when extensive group collaboration is practiced in many
writing classrooms. (15)
Faigley’s conclusion is that, while composition classrooms espouse a pedagogy that
celebrates the benefits of collaborative work and knowledge, instructors continue to keep
students from enjoying all of the benefits of a collaborative atmosphere by upholding the
idol of the autonomous author.
In creating an environment which implies a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude
toward authorship and plagiarism, writing instruction fails to help students meet the
expectations of the University’s policies when working with their own writing. This issue
is further compounded when the dynamic and diverse milieus in which student writers
operate are considered as pieces in this puzzle. In order to change this, a better
understanding of discourse communities and of collaboration and authorship must be
reflected in the goals and pedagogies employed in first-year composition courses.
David Bartholomae has further argued that one of the biggest challenges college
students face in learning to write at an academic level is that:
the student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized
discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably
one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy… he
must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing
will most certainly be required long before the skill is ‘learned.’ (3-4)
The dynamic portrayed by Bartholomae—that of the student writers mimicking the voice
12
of the university, even though they clearly lack the background knowledge and skills
necessary to do so—forces students into a liminal space. Though not yet members of
academic discourse communities, they must somehow learn to write, speak, research, and
think as though they were.
In order to create classrooms that more fully embrace Bartholomae’s liminal
student identity, first-year composition classrooms should revise their course goals and
content to highlight the importance of understanding the diverse discourse communities
that exist on CSUS’s campus, and their influence on student writing. The Council of
Writing Program Administrators (WPA) has further echoed this sentiment in stating that
at the completion of a first-year composition course, students should be able to, among
other things, “integrate their own ideas with the ideas of others” as well as “understand
the relationship among language, knowledge and power” (“Outcome Statement”). While
the first of these goals seems to grasp at preparing students to navigate the bogs and
marshes of plagiarism and academic honesty, the latter seems to move students towards a
deeper understanding of the implications of language and power. This might help
students understand why in academic discourse communities, citation and attribution are
important features. Despite the importance of these two goals in a student’s transition into
academic discourse communities, it can be difficult to find evidence of these goals being
taught in first-year composition courses. My questions began as: (a) What are CSUS’s
policies on plagiarism? (b) How do these policies influence students’ sense of authorship
and integration into the academic discourse communities? (c) How do first-year
13
composition instructors at CSUS currently teach about plagiarism? (d) What can firstyear composition instructors do better in order to help students understand the
implications of academic honesty and attribution in terms of students’ identities and
integration into the academic discourse communities?
So far I have argued that several tensions currently exist in first-year composition
classrooms at CSUS regarding what emphasis first-year composition courses should
place on academic honesty, attribution, and plagiarism. Additionally, there are larger
societal attitudes that valorize the private ownership of words but which conflict with a
student’s need to learn to collaborate with peers and written texts. The purpose, therefore,
of this thesis is to interrogate the current policies on plagiarism and the goals of first-year
composition at CSUS, and explore how plagiarism is presented and taught in first-year
composition classrooms. Through this analysis, I will locate areas of first-year
composition that can be re-envisioned in order to assist students in making a complete
transition to the academic discourse communities. By developing classroom practices for
first-year composition that will make plagiarism a transparent issue in the classroom, f
students will be better prepared to write, think, and read within their disciplinary
discourse communities at the university.
Mode of Inquiry
My goal in this work is to approach questions of authorship and plagiarism in the
first-year composition class by several modes of inquiry. I hope to, in part, dissect the
deficiencies of classroom policies on plagiarism (a critique mode of inquiry) with
14
suggestions of how instructors can better prepare students for the task of writing within
the parameters of the existing university policies (an assimilationist mode). In doing so, it
is not my goal to set these modes of inquiry at odds with one another; rather, by
approaching the questions of authorship and plagiarism from multiple angles, it is my
hope that I will be able to emphasize just how complex these questions are and that there
is no one way to improve the ways in which these questions are addressed within the
university.
15
Chapter 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
If you play chess, you can only do certain things with the pieces, otherwise you are not
playing chess. But those constraints do not in themselves tell you what moves to make.
--Robert Scholes
Introduction
In this chapter, I will examine the relationship between the ways in which
plagiarism is taught in first-year composition and university plagiarism policies on
students’ integration into academic discourse communities. By defining the relationship
among these key factors, I will show that students who participate in classrooms that
make authorship, plagiarism, and academic honesty important components of the
classroom dialogue will be better prepared to be members of their chosen discourse
communities. In order to do so, it is important to highlight several key assumptions on
which this work will rely. The first is that currently many students struggle to become
members of the discourse communities within the disciplines in which they seek degrees,
certification, and advanced learning. A second assumption that I will be working with is
that if we revise the goals of first-year composition, students will better be able to
transition from outsiders to full-fledged members of these communities. The final
assumption is that changes in the way instructors portray these policies and issues of
academic honesty in the classroom will further enable students to understand how texts
16
are valued in discourse communities, which will further encourage students to be more
cognizant of the ways they use and cite texts.
These three assumptions act as a way of diagnosing the problem (failure to
integrate into their discourse communities) that exists for many students and how
pedagogical practices can mediate or assist students with this integration. For this work, I
will assess the failure to integrate into discourse communities through two different
measurements. The first measurement occurs when students leave the university early,
either by dropping out or failing out. Inasmuch as their departure from the university
denotes a literal failure of classes, or a choice to no longer continue in the academic
discourse community, these students have in effect elected out of, or been forced out, of
the community. This measurement locates students whose exile from their chosen
academic discourse community is complete. A second measurement for assessing
students’ lack of integration is by determining which students are unable to make rote
behaviors of the discourse community an inextricable part of their communications with
other members of the community, and more importantly for this work, a fluid part of their
writing within the community.3
My next two assumptions rely on the evidence that I will include in the next
section of this chapter that shows some students do not integrate into academic discourse
communities. If students are failing to integrate into discourse communities, then my
assumption is that first-year composition instructors can make positive changes to their
3
I will discuss both of these measurements later in this chapter.
17
classroom that will help students make conventions and ways of thinking valued by each
discourse community an automatic function of their writing.
In this chapter, I will define what discourse communities are, what the goals of
first-year composition are, and what the plagiarism policies at CSUS currently are. By
defining their relationship, I will identify pedagogies used in first-year composition that
inhibit students from fully entering the academic discourse communities they encounter
on the university’s campus.
Discourse Communities
Any attempt to define what a discourse community is must eventually come to
James E. Porter’s “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” In his article, Porter
sets out not only to define the term discourse community, but also to explain the discourse
community’s place in academe. Porter maintains that a discourse community is “a group
of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels
and whose discourse is regulated” (38-39). We can expand Porter’s definition of a
discourse community by extending his “approved channels” to other rules that govern
discourse communities. These rules must also regulate behaviors such as which members
have power (and how much), who has the authority to speak for the community, what the
ethos of the group is, and how members communicate. Furthermore, the regulating
function of the discourse community must also standardize the conventions of written
texts shared within the community. These regulatory functions are localized and specific
to each individual community, meaning that in locations and situations where discourse
18
communities converge and interact, one would be likely to find many different ways of
communicating. We can also infer from Porter’s research that, while the communities
may value different kinds of communication or conventions, no one discourse community
can be said to be better than or inferior to any other.
M. Jimmie Killingsworth further differentiates discourse communities as either
local or global. A local discourse community, for example, is “the place where writers
ordinarily work—the classroom, the company, the department” while global discourse
communities enjoy no such geographical proximity (111). Instead, global communities
are bound by the members’ “likemindedness, political and intellectual affiliation, and
other such ‘special interests’ and are maintained by widely dispersed discourse practices
made possible by modern publishing and other communication technologies” (111).
These two types of discourse communities, while distinct in the physical makeup of their
members, are not mutually exclusive. Killingsworth’s distinction between types of
discourse communities is important because it helps us to understand that the boundaries
between communities may blur, and the communities may even overlap with one another.
Such communities may share a similar interest, but approach the subject matter in
different ways. Local communities that share similar interests with global communities
may tend to overlap as well.
To help illustrate how discourse communities operate, one example that we can
examine is the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This group is composed
of a governing board of elected representatives, as well members, who may also be
19
instructors, scholars, and even students who are committed to “improving the teaching
and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education” (“Mission
Statement”). The group’s composition is held together by the members’ dedication to
improving their own practices and to pursuing knowledge and research that informs the
discipline as a whole. However, the goals of the NCTE also overlap with the goals and
pursuits of many other discourse communities to which the NCTE’s members may
belong. For example, while I may be a member of the NCTE, I am also a member of
similar discourse communities with similar goals, such as the community of graduate
students studying composition at CSUS and the community of teaching associates at
CSUS. While these very similar discourse communities have many common aspects
(they share jargon, goals, interests, etc.) they still vary in the way members of each
community communicate. I can speak with other members of the CSUS graduate
program much more informally and with more authority then I would address a member
of the Board of Directors of the NCTE.
While all of these groups generally have the same purpose as the NCTE
(improving the quality of the teaching of English), they are not identical. For example,
the NCTE is not only concerned with composition studies at the college level, but it is
also concerned with improving instruction at the K-12 level, an emphasis not necessarily
shared in the English Composition graduate program at CSUS, whose emphasis lies
mainly in improving writing instruction and research at the college level. Even with a
localized group such as English faculty at CSUS, faculty members have not come to a
20
consensus about which levels or grades of English should be emphasized. This lack of
cohesion on this point only further demonstrates how dynamic and diverse discourse
communities are.
Not all discourse communities share similar values and goals. While the NCTE
and the English department at CSUS overlap in many ways, some groups clash and
conflict with one another. This can be observed in the schedule of classes that a typical
first-year college student may take. These students are asked to learn to communicate as a
peer with compositionists as well as, for example, with historians, mathematicians, and
biologists. As Lucille Parkinson McCarthy has argued,
successful students are those who can, in their interactions with teachers
during the semester, determine what constitutes appropriate texts in each
classroom: the content, structures, language, ways of thinking, and types
of evidence required in that discipline and by that teacher. (233)
What McCarthy describes is the diverse metropolis of communities students must learn to
navigate, just as they would learn to navigate a complicated subway system in a new city.
Students will read textbooks, scholarly articles, and other materials that use a variety of
citation methods (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.), hold opposing values, and differ in their
approaches to the writing situation. A scientific discourse community may advocate one
style of writing that stresses the use of abstracts and the avoidance of the use of first
person, while the disciplines found within the humanities may approach the writing
context from the opposite set of values.
21
Recent scholarship on discourse communities has emphasized the many ways that
academic discourse communities differ. Anne Beaufort has contended that writing
instruction at the university level should be reformed to aid students in developing
expertise in writing within the discourse communities they chose. For many students, the
difficulty in writing in the university comes because there is often no explicit instruction
in what Beaufort terms the “discourse community norms,” or in the aspects of writing
that determine “what ‘counts’ as…proof, i.e., what precise types of warrants and claims
constitute the rhetorical features of an argument” within specific academic discourse
communities (“Developmental” 143). Beaufort’s version of discourse communities
within the university suggests a continuing conversation in composition studies that has
yet to determine one single approach to what students need to be taught about discourse
communities and how that should be accomplished. Beaufort reaffirms McCarthy’s
assertion that the difference between the written communications of various discourse
communities is not superficial, but represents diverse ways of thinking.
If the conversation about discourse communities was not already complex
enough, other researchers have continued to problematize and expand our understanding
of how discourse communities interact with one another, as played out in the frustrations
and accomplishments in their students. Christopher Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki
emphasize that university students are not only trying to acquire the writing practices of a
new academic discourse community, but they must also understand how the rhetoric of
their home discourse influences their writing. Furthermore, rather than helping students
22
enact the new rhetoric of the academic discourse communities, many of their home
discourses “are not purposely enacted” (22). These home discourses, whether they are
discourses of a specific class, gender, or ethnic background, influence students’ ability to
engage with new discourse communities to varying degrees. As Thaiss & Zawacki point
out, students may have backgrounds that make writing about themselves anathema
because the home discourse values the identity of the group over the identity of the
individual (22). The cultural expectations of these home discourses are not easily erased
or silenced; rather, they require students’ full understanding of how their existing
discourse communities affect their writing, as well as the difficulties that may arise in
acquiring membership in new discourse communities.
When students are new to this diverse milieu and do not fully understand the
demands placed upon them, the result can be disastrous. Students may not learn to engage
with the communities or acquire the skills necessary to do so until later in their academic
careers. These students need, as Lisa Delpit has stated, to make “the processes of
conscious learning” become “unconscious acquisition” (50).4 First-year composition
instructors need to understand that the way an economist, for example, communicates
through writing with other economists is very different then the way an anthropologist
might write to his or her own field. These communities can be seen as their own
ecological system: they have their own rules, their own hierarchies, and their own values.
Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) also observed that learning the “genres of disciplinary or
professional discourse [is] similar to second language acquisition, requiring immersion into the culture and
a lengthy period of apprenctieship and inculteration” (13).
4
23
Since students in first-year composition are outsiders in relation to all academic
discourse communities, they must be brought from rote practice to a level where the ways
of thinking and writing are more than second nature and part of their writing process.
Calls for this approach to writing instruction have been issued from researchers such as
Anne Beaufort who have, unfortunately, found that much of what students discover about
writing in their discourse communities comes through inference rather than explicit
instruction (“Developmental” 177). To combat this occurrence, first-year composition
classrooms can take a more proactive stance by teaching students about academic
discourse communities’ “communicative channels…whose interplay affects the purposes
and meanings of the written texts produced” by students (“Developmental” 139). In other
words, students must be taught and must internalize the idea that what is valued in terms
of appropriate genre, diction, and conventions (to only name a few) varies among the
discourse communities. This will assist students in acquiring membership in the academic
discourse communities.
In order to understand this need better, we can observe how this process occurs by
analyzing two vastly different writing situations and observe how the choices the student
writer must make overlap. A first-year composition student might be asked in a business
class to prepare a memorandum to a company discussing the policies of the company and
perhaps deficiencies in those policies. This form of writing will have a different intended
audience (a corporate executive, for example), than the intended audience of a letter to a
politician about a piece of legislation that is up for vote that the same student may write
24
for a political science course. While both of these writing situations are similar in that
they ask students to address audiences other than their instructors, the rhetorical choices
students must make in responding to each are very different because they are writing in
two very different communities. These assignments even have similar purposes: both ask
the student to convince an audience that, based on the student’s analysis of a given
situation, the audience should act according to the student’s suggestions. However, the
persona that the student must take up is very different and is dependent upon the context
in which the student is writing.
Students wishing to develop a persona appropriate to the writing situation must
analyze and respond to many rhetorical elements of the situation. This imagined first-year
student may come to realize that his/her audience for each assignment is vastly different.
In the memorandum, the student would be addressing an imagined superior and
employer, and must therefore align his/her tone, message, and stance within that power
dynamic. When he/she shifts to writing to a politician, the student can write in an
impassioned, even irritated tone. The tone for both pieces, however, must contain an air
of being informed. In order to convince an audience that holds more power than the
writer, the student must show that the proposed changes are based on evidence and
analysis, which is exactly the kind of support a politician may look for to be persuaded.
To return momentarily to my larger goal, what I have described are just a few of
the rhetorical choices that student writers must make. As they negotiate their ideas with
the rules and constraints of new discourse communities, students must learn not only to
25
make clear rhetorical choices in their language, they must also understand what values
each community holds in terms of using evidence and citing other authors and experts. In
other words, just as being able to select an appropriate persona for student writing is a
vital choice students must learn to negotiate, students need to simultaneously understand
that part of developing their ethos is learning the conventions of citation and attribution.
Failure to Integrate Into Discourse Communities
In this work I will use two different forms of measurement to describe students
who fail to integrate into their academic discourse communities. The first is described by
John Wesley White and Patrick R. Lowenthal in their article, published in the Winter
2011 edition of The Review of Higher Education, about the current trends of student
integration into the academic discourse communities. White and Lowenthal argue that
“minority students leave college early (dropping out or failing) at rates that are
disproportionately higher than the student body in general” (286). By failing out of the
university or choosing to leave it, these students present one way of measuring whether
or not students are integrating into the academic discourse communities.
Another indication of an individual’s success in integrating into academic
discourse communities can be seen in Lisa Delpit’s work with K-12 minority students.
Delpit has argued that successful acquisition of other languages is the process of “rotelearning…brought to automaticity” (49). According to Delpit, when an individual has
successfully acquired the new language, the affective filter, or mental block that occurs
when individuals are scared or nervous and prevents learners from accessing the new
26
language, no longer hinders the individual from speaking in the new language (50).
Delpit’s analysis of language learning differs in some ways from the acquisition of the
language of a new discourse community that I have been discussing. Primarily, much of
Delpit’s research deals with her students’ ability to speak in a new language dialect,
while my work is mostly concerned with examining the written element of discourse
communities. However, Delpit’s framework of language acquisition is useful in
understanding the transformation that students must go through in acquiring the language
of a new discourse community.
Just as Delpit suggests that a successful transition into a new language is a
combination of rote learning followed by practice culminating with automaticity, learning
to write as a member of academic discourse communities follows the same pattern. In
first-year composition, students are introduced into new forms of writing through rote
pedagogies: the instructor teaches students what a summary is, and students produce
summaries. However, too often the learning stops at this stage. In other words,
composition instructors cannot assume that just because students have been presented and
duplicated a specific form of writing, including attribution and citation, that they have
assimilated into the discourse community. It is only when the students have achieved a
level of fluidity and automaticity in performing the writing that instructors can say
students have become members of a discourse community.
Regardless of what measure is utilized in determining the frequency of student
integration into academic discourse communities, there are currently populations of
27
students who fail to integrate into the academic discourse community, or are at risk of
failing. The 2004 report by The Education Foundation reveals that “even among the
students most likely to succeed—those who begin their college career as full-time
freshmen in four-year colleges and universities—only six out of every ten of them, on
average, get a B.A. within six years” (Carey 1). The Foundation’s report further observes
that sixty-seven percent of white students successfully completed a B.A. after six years,
while Latino students only completed the same degrees at a rate of only forty-seven
percent (2).
Additional studies have further shown that a discrepancy exists between the
longitudinal performance among minority students enrolled in college and that of their
white counterparts. The American Council on Education’s (ACE) 2007 Annual
Supplement Report, “Minorities in Higher Education,” found that in 2005 only 73.5% of
African American males graduated high school, while 85.6% of white males were able to
successfully complete high school (Cook & Cordova 8). Of students that graduated high
school, only 38% of African American males enrolled in college, while 46.1% of white
males did the same (8). Not only does the ACE’s research demonstrate a discrepancy in
how many minority students are able the enroll in college courses, but their research also
found that in 2005, 68.8% of bachelor’s degree recipients were white, while only 22.3%
were from a minority background (14-17)5. ACE’s report is able to corroborate the
5
The remaining degrees were awarded to foreign students and students with unknown ethnic
backgrounds.
28
Education Foundation’s findings that minority students are less likely to successful
complete college coursework and integrate into the academic discourse community. 6
Student populations at risk of leaving the university without completing a degree
(and thereby failing to enter into the academic discourse community) attend CSUS just as
they do other universities across the United States. The most recent report from the
California State University system is that among total enrollment (freshman through
graduate students) for the Fall 2010 semester at CSUS, 41.0% of students were white,
with the remaining 59% of the student body were of minority backgrounds (“CSU
Enrollment”). What we can draw from these figures is that if minority students are
statistically more likely to fail to integrate into the academic discourse community, and
CSUS has a large population of these students, then changes need to be made at CSUS in
order to ensure that these at-risk students have the help that they need in order to succeed
and integrate into chosen discourse communities.
Entering the Academic Discourse Community
The way in which most individuals enter a new discourse community (especially
those at the university) has been aptly described by Kenneth Burke, who imagined that
entering these communities is like entering a parlor were a heated conversation has been
in progress for some time. Burke further asks us to imagine that, since nobody seems to
be able to stop the conversation long enough to bring the newcomer up to speed, that
6
The discrepancy between minority students’ and their white counterparts’ participation in
college is more pronounced in graduate programs. Sarah M. Ovink and Brian D. Veazey reported in the
June 2011 edition of Research in Higher Education that minority students earned approximately “10% of
science and engineering doctorates awarded in 2006, with whites earning about 76%” (370).
29
person “listens for a while, until [he/she] decide that [he/she has] caught the tenor of the
argument,” which leads Burke to the now famous command that any newcomer must
“put in your oar” (110). After the new individual has put in his/her thoughts, the
conversation begins to include him/her as well and, even after the participant has left, the
conversation will continue on (111). Charles Bazerman has reinforced this model of
conversation (written and oral) by suggesting that “[conversation] requires absorption of
what prior speakers have said, consideration of how earlier comments relate to the
responder’s thoughts, and a response framed to the situation and the responder’s
purpose” (657, emphasis added). This, however, highlights some of the key struggles that
first-year composition instructors are faced with. Namely, how can instructors prepare
students to engage with (not merely observe) one or more of the many community
conversations occurring on campus?
It can be difficult to determine whether or not a student is merely observing the
conversation of an academic discourse rather than engaging with it. The difference
between a student observing and engaging in the conversation of an academic discourse
community can be seen in student writing that, as the WPA states in its Outcomes for
First-Year Composition, “sees a writing assignment as a series of tasks including
finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary
sources” (“Outcome Statement”). This outcome promulgated by the WPA contains all of
the components of conversation outlined by Bazerman and Burke. Bazerman’s emphasis
on absorbing what has already been said on the subject and Burke’s focus on listening to
30
the existing conversation can be seen in the WPA’s emphasis on critical reading and
research as important steps prior to students’ composing a response to the writing
assignment. Inasmuch as student writing reflects this process, students can be said to be
engaging in the discourse. Students who do not demonstrate this understanding in their
writing are not engaging with the discourse, and are thus merely observers or outsiders of
the discourse community.
Plagiarism in the University
Part of students’ engagement with the academic conversation is being able to
synthesize their ideas and thoughts with those of authors. In order to accomplish this task
with the level of engagement that Bazerman and Burke set forth, first-year composition
students must learn to navigate the often murky waters of attributing and citing primary
and secondary sources. Confusion about how to properly cite sources or lack of training
for students can result in charges of plagiarism against students. I will argue that firstyear composition students’ ability to understand, internalize, and replicate these
important conventions are part of their integration into academic discourse communities,
and that first-year composition faculty have an obligation to aid students with this process
by making these issues integral to the classroom discussions. In order to do so, I will first
explain what plagiarism is and why it is so important to the academic discourse
communities.
While Rebecca Moore Howard has maintained that the term plagiarism evades
definition, it would be insufficient for this work to leave it at that (Sexuality 474). The
31
most obvious and blatant forms of plagiarism occur when a student submits a piece of
writing that has been written by another individual as his/her own, whether the ‘original’
author (as problematic as this term is) is a friend, classmate, or an anonymous writer for
any of the many paper mills that are available via the internet. It is not, however, my
intention to focus on the commission of paper theft. These practices can be aptly
characterized as acts of fraud, which, according to Oxford English Dictionary, is the “the
quality or disposition of being deceitful” or even “criminal deception” (“Fraud”). When
students commit this act of fraud, they have clearly crossed a line into unethical behavior
that is in violation of university policies. While the CSUS Academic Honesty Policy &
Procedures Manual, which is promulgated by the Office of the Vice President for Student
Affairs, never defines the term ‘academic honesty’ or ‘dishonesty,’ (the “Academic
Honesty Policy”) it does affirmatively state that “principles of truth and honesty are
recognized as fundamental to a community of scholars and teachers” and that
academic dishonesty defrauds all those who depend upon the integrity of
the University, its courses and its degrees. This fraud is accomplished to
the extent that faculty, students or campus employees knowingly or
unwittingly allow academic dishonesty to work its deception. (“Academic
Honesty”).
When students plagiarize by having a roommate write a paper on their behalf, they have
committed not only a textbook example of plagiarism, but have also demonstrated an act
of academic of dishonesty. These students have hopes of receiving a passing grade on the
32
assignment and simultaneously attempt to deceive the instructor and the university by
receiving a grade they do not deserve. This form of plagiarism is clearly a violation of
academic honesty.
CSUS’s definition of plagiarism is not limited to acts of theft or overt cheating. It
includes, beyond theft, acts such as patchwriting or mosaic writing. As Moore Howard
explains, patchwriting is the act of “copying from a source text and then deleting some
words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonymsubstitutions” and is, according to Howard, a learning tool for novice writers (“Plagiarism
Pentimento” 233). The act of patchwriting can be seen as a learning tool (instead of an
avenue for cheating) among students who know that sources are needed to complete a
writing assignment, but have not yet developed adequate skills for synthesizing their own
ideas with the ideas and words of others.
This rhetorical move is more difficult to execute than first-year composition
faculty perhaps give it credit. As Gerald Graff and Cathy Berkenstein write in their
preface to They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, “academic
writing in particular calls upon writers not simply to express their own ideas, but to do so
as a response to what others have said” (xvi). For many students in first-year
composition, their experiences with writing have not yet asked them to enter into a
conversation. This may seem like a grave assertion, given that the California Department
of Education’s California Core State Standards (CCSS) for Reading Standards for
Literacy in History/Social Studies in Grades 11 through 12 state in part:
33
[Students will] integrate information from diverse sources, both primary
and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting
discrepancies among sources. (50)
The CCSS for Language Standards in Grades 11 through 12 further require that students
“demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage…
[and understand] that usage is a matter of convention [and] can change over time” (45)
What this information suggests is that, despite the fact that students are called upon
during high school to understand how to integrate sources into their own writings, and are
further asked to master conventions, plagiarism and citation conventions, these are not
yet fully integrated into students’ practices upon graduation. This observation has been
confirmed by Anne Beaufort, who found that the participant in her case study was
inconsistent with his sometimes sparse source citations and “was not certain when and
how to use citations to serve the rhetorical purpose of building the argument or creating
credibility” (“Developmental” 165). Thus, while the public schools in states such as
California may be trying to develop the critical reading, writing, and thinking abilities of
students in order to prepare them for the workplace and for college, students are still
underprepared, upon entering the university7, for the challenges placed upon them in
attempting to integrate their thoughts with the ideas of other scholars.
7
It is worth mentioning that source integration is not assessed on high school-level standardized
tests. This may lead to high school instructors not emphasize this element of writing, which would, in part,
explain why many students enter the university unprepared for this element of college writing.
34
Amy Robillard has elucidated yet another point of contention among
compositionists when framing the issue of plagiarism: whether it is an individual issue or
a social one. In other words, some scholars argue plagiarism is a “problem stemming
from the missteps of the writer,” while others view it as a problem that is “part of a
practice that involves participants’ values, attitudes, and feelings as well as their social
relationships to each other and to the institutions in which they work” (“We Won’t” 11). I
will utilize this existing scholarship on plagiarism as a foundation to build on. In this
thesis, I will view plagiarism as a rhetorical function of diverse discourse communities
and thus a social concern, one that embodies Erika Lindemann’s assumptions of rhetoric.
In her book A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Erika Lindemann explains her key
assumptions about rhetoric, two of which I will highlight here as a way of explaining the
importance of understanding plagiarism when discussing discourse communities.
Lindemann states first that “when we use language in more formal ways, with the
intention of changing attitudes or behaviors, of explaining a subject of expressing the
self, or of calling attention to a text that can be appreciated for its artistic merits, our
purpose is rhetorical” (40). This assumption of a rhetorical piece of writing seems
applicable to the kinds of writing assignments that students are asked to complete at the
university. While first-year instructors often have various purposes for any given writing
assignment, ultimately at least one of the purposes is rhetorically driven. A biology
instructor may assign a lab report for students to demonstrate a student understands the
scientific method while a political science instructor may assign a persuasive essay with
35
the hopes that students will call attention to deficiencies of America’s current handling of
the economy. Each of these very different assignments still retain a drive to create writing
that is inherently rhetorical. Lindemann also explains that when we practice rhetoric, it
“implies choices, for both the speaker or writer and the audience. When we practice
rhetoric we make decisions about our subject, audience, … the best order to present our
ideas, and the best resources of language to express them” (40-41).Thus, when students
make decisions about how to incorporate sources (expertly or poorly), or whether to turn
in a paper-mill essay, students as writers are making rhetorical gestures to an audience.
These gestures can substantiate the students’ membership within an academic discourse
community or highlight their Otherness. However, it is ultimately the composition
instructor’s responsibility to assist students in understanding what their choices are, and
what the repercussions of their choices may be.
Administrators’ Perceptions of Plagiarism
To further complicate the predicament that first-year composition students face,
the perception that university administrators have about plagiarism makes it more
difficult for students to fully integrate into the academic discourse communities, and
sheds interesting light on the process by which policies such as CSUS’s Policy Manual
are created. After hours of interviews with multiple administrators, Bergmann found that
all administrators:
above the rank of department chair mentioned how little students seemed
to understand using sources appropriately, not only the rules for citation,
36
but also and, more importantly, the reasoning behind their institutions’
statements on academic integrity. (150)
However, there is a crucial schism in their own logic, given that these same interviewees
also indicated that they did not believe the rules and conventions of academic honesty
were ambiguous to students (Bergmann 149). The attitude that surrounds the discourse
community which develops and enforces an academic honesty policy certainly paints a
poor image for students—administrators seem to believe that the rules are clear for
students and yet students constantly fail to meet the unambiguous demands of the
university.
The danger of this administrative perception of plagiarism is that it creates a
binary system of identities into which students are forced. This binary consists of honest
students who do not steal words and ideas, and dishonest students who improperly take
credit for the works of others (Valentine 90). This binary is not a harmless, natural
occurrence, but a system which “regulates students’ identity for professors and
administrators” (90). Evidence of this binary can be found in CSUS’s Academic Honesty
Policy, which states that “plagiarism in connection with an academic program at a
campus may warrant expulsion, suspension, probation or a lesser sanction (“Academic
Honesty”). The threat of lessening a student’s status on campus is in addition to any
reduced grade or a failing grade on any assignment where the instructor has determined
that plagiarism has occurred, whether or not deceit was a factor in the student’s choices
(“Academic Honesty”). The policies of CSUS create a binary of student identities by (1)
37
punishing beginning students for being novices in a new discourse community, as well as
by (2) being written in a vague way, making the policies difficult to use in classroom
settings.
One possible result of this scenario is that students who have failed to learn and
properly reproduce a convention becoming further distanced from their communities by
virtue of the identity ascribed to them. When students are found guilty of plagiarism
without an intent to deceit or cheat (for example, plagiarized by way of mosaic writing),
and are penalized for not having been properly taught (or for having not fully understood)
the conventions of writing in the academic discourse community, students then become
the victims of their status as novices. This scenario is possible under the definition of
plagiarism found in the CSUS Academic Honesty Policy:
Plagiarism, as a form of cheating, is the use of distinctive ideas or works
belonging to another person without providing adequate acknowledgment
of that person’s contribution. Regardless of the means of appropriation,
incorporation of another’s work into one’s own requires adequate
identification and acknowledgment...Acknowledgment is not necessary
when the material used is common knowledge. (“Academic Honesty”)
The penalties for being convicted under the policy (as such charges are enforced
by disciplinary committees) are not just for the flagrant offense of turning in a paper mill
essay. Since the Academic Honesty Policy encompasses both the fraudulent aspect of
38
plagiarism as well as the more benign acts of patchwriting8 or poor citation practices,
students unconsciously enter the university and into an existing binary—between being
an honest student or a plagiarist, without being informed about the severity of their
choices when they write and utilize sources in first-year composition and all other
courses in which they write.
The results are that students who have either been poorly taught or failed to fully
grasp the importance or format of citation risk being sentenced with, as Howard aptly
phrased it, the “academic death penalty9.” The penalty here does not seem to match the
severity of the crimes with which students are charged.
In addition to punishing novice students for being beginners, the policy (much
like many other university policies) utilizes vague language that could make it difficult
for new students to understand what practices are acceptable, and which are not. This can
be seen in the Policy’s reference to common knowledge as being exempt from the
requirements of citation and attribution. However, what is considered common
knowledge varies between discourse community and academic disciplines. This
reference, then, may serve more as a barrier to students who are trying to understand
plagiarism instead of clarifying the issue for students.
8
The Academic Honesty Policy refers to acts of patchwriting as “‘mosaics’...the interspersing a
few of one’s own words while, in essence, copying another’s work” (“Academic Honesty”).
9
Another possible explanation for student plagiarism occurs with students from cultural
backgrounds with a different and far less strict tradition of what constitutes plagiarism. This affect of
contrastive rhetorics will not be explored in this thesis.
39
Students’ Perception of Plagiarism
Many studies have been conducted to determine student attitudes and beliefs
about academic honesty. I will highlight several of these studies that demonstrate varying
results about students’ understanding and beliefs about plagiarism. This lack of
consistency shows that students do not fully understand plagiarism and academic
honesty, despite the administrative attitudes on the subject.
The Journal of Higher Education reported a study conducted to discover the
perspectives of first and second-year university students on issues of plagiarism. Through
methodologies such as surveys, interviews, and focus group sessions, the researchers
discovered that, of sixty-one student participants who were asked, “‘if you rewrite
something you get from a book completely in your own words, do you need to cite
that?’”, only fourteen of the participants properly acknowledged that such a situation
warranted citation (Power 650). This study reiterates one of the premises upon which this
work is based: specifically, that while administrators may believe that policies of
academic honesty are clear to most students, in reality, those policies and conventions are
deep pools of murky water that are inaccessible to students.
The study’s researchers were careful to make sure that the student-participants
understood that their identities would be kept confidential, and, as an additional
motivation for students to be honest in interviews and focus group sessions, instructors
were not present at any time. During these teacher-free moments, the student-participants
opened up about many topics, including their perceptions of their teachers. For example,
40
one participant, Jake (a pseudonym), revealed the following about his impression of
instructor attitudes towards plagiarism:
But if [teachers] made it out to be so bad, they would teach it, too. They
wouldn’t just, mention it. They say, its bad, don’t do it. A lot of
ramifications if you do it, so don’t do it. But they don’t really elaborate on
how to and how not to. So it’s just like, students in one ear and out the
other because [teachers] don’t pound the point through that it’s as bad as it
is. So if it’s as bad as they make it out to be, then maybe they should teach
it more. Maybe they’re just saying that to scare you. (657)
Power’s conclusion from her study, however, stops short of making any specific
recommendations for the classroom. However, from students like Jake, Power reveals
that part of the problem (from the students’ point of view) is their belief that, if
plagiarism and citation conventions were as serious as teachers make them seem, they
would be taught explicitly in the classroom—that instructors wouldn’t just tell students
citation is important, but show them why it is important. However, her conclusion that
instructors and departments cannot “assume a one-size-fits-all approach” to enforcing
plagiarism policies (658), does not give any direction to readers as to how to create a new
sizing chart for plagiarism.10
I will argue that one way of accomplishing this goal is by revisiting our first-year
10
The issue of teaching plagiarism in the classroom is further muddied by research such as
Whitley & Keith-Spiegel (2002), which found that many instructors often assume first-year composition
students come to class ready-made with citation skills in their toolboxes despite students often being
deficient in this area.
41
composition classrooms and updating first-year composition pedagogies to include more
dynamic approaches that make issues of intellectual property, academic honesty, and the
citation conventions of our discourse communities more active components of the
classroom setting.
Stephen F. Hard, James M. Conway, and Antonia C. Moran’s research study
published in The Journal of Higher Education focused on studying the descriptive norms
of 421 undergraduate students at a medium sized public university in the northeastern
United States, as well as 157 faculty members (full-time and part-time). These descriptive
norms focus on what “members of a group actually do,” as opposed to the moral rules of
a group are (injunctive or prescriptive norms) (1058). The goals of the research study
were to assess how accurate students’ belief about academic misconduct of their peers are
(peer descriptive norms), and to discover what students believed was the frequency of
academic misconduct by their peers. Additionally, the researchers sough to discover what
attitudes faculty members held about student academic misconduct. The researchers
based these two goals on a foundation of research that demonstrates that students tend to
conform their practices to what they assume the practices of their peers are, as well as
research which suggests that when intervention is introduced to help students understand
the real beliefs and practices of their peers, positive changes can be made in student
practices. In part, the research relies on Whitley (1998), who reviewed sixteen studies and
concluded that there was a strong correlation between what students’ believed about their
peers’ academic misconduct, and students’ own misconduct. In other words, if faculty
42
can interject positive changes into curriculum that illuminates the real state of plagiarism
and academic honesty, research suggests this can help students change their own
practices to better comply with acceptable practices. The participants were of similar to
students in CSUS first-year composition courses. While the locale of the university is
very different then CSUS, the student participants were undergraduate enrolled in general
education courses with a mean age of 20.9 years (Hard, et al 1063). The results of the
study, however, are limited since the data was only drawn through one research method
(surveys of both faculty and students).
While investigating how faculty attitudes influenced student beliefs about
academic misconduct, Hard, et. al. (2006) discovered that students’ self-reports indicated
that the student-participants were not “habitual offenders,” but that 90.1% of studentparticipants admitted to committing at least one act of academic misconduct, and that
students believed their peers committed academic misconduct more frequently than was
reported in the research (1067, 1068). Of the sixteen misconduct behaviors surveyed,
60.6% of students reported that they had copied language, tables or figures of data
directly or indirectly from a source that was not properly attributed, and 39.4% of
students surveyed admitted to copying information from a website and submitting it as
their own (1069).11 This research indicates that, while students self-report that they do not
habitually commit these acts, many students have violated academic honesty policies.
11
An additional 8.2% of students surveyed admitting to purchasing a paper and submitting it as
their own, and 18% admitted to selling a paper of their own to someone else (Hard 1069). However, since
my focus is not on deceitful acts of plagiarism, these findings will not be discussed.
43
What is not discussed by the researchers, however, is whether or not the students
surveyed understood at the time they committed violations that the practices were in
violation of the academic honesty policies. This would be an important figure to discover,
given that 60.6% of students surveyed admitted to acts similar to patchwriting or mosaicwriting (1069).
In terms of faculty attitudes about academic misconduct, Hard, et. al. (2006),
found that faculty members believed academic misconduct was less prevalent than
students believe it to be, but that faculty still overestimated the frequency of academic
misconduct (Hard 1074). The results of this study could have been limited based upon a
number of factors, utilizing only one research method, sampling from only one
university, and not isolating more specifically a subset of academic misconduct
behaviors.
Elaine S. Barry’s research published in the College Student Journal the same year
as Hard, et. al., focused on how freshman students defined the term plagiarism during a
pretest and then in a posttest conducted after six weeks of homework assignments in
which students practiced paraphrasing and citing sources. A control group also
participated in the pretest and posttest to ensure that students’ developing understanding
of plagiarism was not due to exposure to academic honesty in other classes. Barry found
that students’ beginning definitions of what plagiarism is did not stray beyond the trite
phrase of “‘taking someone else’s words’” (377). After practicing citation and
paraphrasing, students’ scores on the posttest improved compared to their pretest, but
44
Barry is honest in revealing that scores “did not increase to the fullest possible extent
after paraphrasing practice,” and concluding that “further research will need to consider
the types of experiences beyond paraphrasing practices that would lead to increases [in
student understanding] … of plagiarism in posttest definitions” (383). One of my goals
for this thesis is to offer suggestions for how to accomplish Barry’s call for more (and
better) practices in the classroom to help students understand these serious issues.12
Specifically, my hope is that when first-year composition faculty help students move
beyond rote practices of citation and attribution by evoking critical thinking, critical
reading, and critical writing about these issues, students will greatly increases their
awareness of the importance of citation and attribution, and change their practices.
Barry’s research confirms the assertion that Hard, et. al. made based on their
research and literature review: specifically, that faculty intervention can assist in
changing student practices in terms of academic honesty. Barry’s finding that practice
with some of the skills associated with attribution positively changed what the students
understood plagiarism to mean suggests that if first-year composition faculty were to take
a similar approach by making authorship, attribution and academic honesty central to the
classroom, these faculty could enjoy similar results.
What Kind of Problem is Plagiarism?
From the policies published by many universities, one might get the impression
that plagiarism is a moral issue (for example, it is often referred to as “academic honesty”
12
This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
45
or as a protection of a student’s integrity, etc.), while others might attempt to categorize it
as merely an issue of convention. Perhaps the best categorization of plagiarism is as a
workplace ethic. In order to teach workplace ethics effectively, Michael Davis argues that
the way of ethics (a mode of teaching) must be implemented. This pedagogy enables
students to see what has been established as right and wrong as determined by the
members of the discourse community (academic honesty as right versus plagiarism as
wrong). This model further attempts to convey to the learner the dynamics of the
relationships between peers within a given community. By focusing on what the group,
as a whole, has decided are the values of the group, students are also taught the
importance of agency, and that they can adhere or not to the principles established by
peers in the field or not become a full-fledged member of the field.
My goal is not to attempt to eradicate policies on academic honesty and
plagiarism, for, as David Bartholmae has stated, “problems of convention are both
problems of finish and problems of substance” (23). My goal is, however, to find ways
that instructors can better prepare students to handle and use sources without opening
them up to disciplinary sanctions. As Robert Scholes has stated, “if you play chess, you
can only do certain things with the pieces, otherwise you are not playing chess. But those
constraints do not in themselves tell you what moves to make” (qtd. in Porter 45)13. As
writing instructors, our goals should be to teach students to engage and interact with
13
Lucille McCarthy and James Briton also use game play metaphors as a way of describing the
dexterity students must exhibit when engaged in critical reading, critical thinking, and critical writing
across the university.
46
texts, to help students learn to incorporate another’s words and thoughts into their
arguments in ways that are sophisticated and conform to the agreed-upon conventions of
academic discourse. Using Scholes’s metaphor, we want students to play the game of
academic writing without violating the rules that control the discourse. Instead of
teaching them to be wary of the game, its rules, and other players (such as the texts they
encounter in the classroom), we must teach them that the conventions are not just
constraints, but guidelines that help them understand the choices they have to make in
terms of writing. The pedagogies that I believe first-year composition instructors should
incorporate into their classrooms will be outlined below, and further discussed in detail in
later chapters.
Goals of First-Year Composition
The teaching of composition has historically been located within the English
department at most universities, despite marked differences between the research and
teaching of writing and the research and teaching of literature. Due in part to this
marriage of disparate fields of study, the research and teaching of writing has made many
concessions, including a “focus on the individual writer alone with the blank piece of
paper” as well as ignoring “the many contexts in which the writing takes place”
(Bazerman 656). This can be seen in course syllabi and course descriptions of many firstyear composition courses, which advocate primarily a process-based classroom and
pedagogy concerned with the writer, instead of focusing on the many writing contexts
and situations that students will encounter across the university campus. In other words,
47
just as the Romantic poets felt the writer can operate in solitude, too many writing
classrooms today focus on the writer and his or her process, rather than the highly
contextualized nature of writing, and what novice students can do to navigate unfamiliar
waters.
Another way in which first-year writing classrooms are problematized is in the
insurmountable task of establishing a unified set of goals for all first-year composition
courses nationwide. Not only do professional organizations differ on what goals need to
be prioritized in first-year composition courses, even universities and faculty members
often disagree on the subject. The Council of Writing Programs Administrators
(“Outcome Statement”), for example, while hesitant to establish standards, has identified
twenty-five different skills, attitudes, and knowledge sets that students should acquire by
the end of first-year composition. Among these diverse outcomes, the WPA focuses on
rhetorical knowledge, an orientation toward knowledge of the writing process, and even
skills in critical thinking, reading and writing. While the WPA has homed in on important
skills for developing writers, the myriad outcomes that the WPA anticipates students to
achieving during their first-year composition course cause some classrooms to focus on
one set or another, thus creating discrepancies in how courses are structured and what
outcomes are emphasized in the classroom, which leads to a failure to create a unified set
of goals.
The WPA is not alone in attempting to set standards and unify the teaching of
composition. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has stated
48
unequivocally that:
though poets and novelists may enjoy debating whether or not writing can
be taught, teachers of writing have more pragmatic aims. Setting aside the
question of whether one can learn to be an artistic genius, there is ample
empirical evidence that anyone can get better at writing, and that what
teachers do makes a difference in how much students are capable of
achieving as writers. (“Mission Statement”)
In first-year composition courses, it is vital that instructors adopt the NCTE’s overall goal
of helping students become better writers. Most composition instructors, in fact, would
probably agree with this goal. However, where divergence becomes apparent is in what
strategies and pedagogies composition instructors implement to assist students in creating
cohesive and well-articulated prose.14 One of the best ways of achieving this is by
helping students see how their writing is contextualized for a specific audience in a
specific discourse community. More specifically, one of the most overlooked ways
students become more involved members of their discourse communities is by
implementing the citation practices of that community. As David Bartholomae has stated,
students are at risk of being appropriated by the academic discourse communities (3).
However, one method that composition instructions can utilize to help combat this is by
serving as the students’ introduction to discourse communities.
The importance of adopting this attitude is reiterated by the NCTE, which argued
Mark L. Waldo’s (2004) research suggests that there is a “cognitive disconnect” between what
instructors do with writing, and what they expect their students to do (19).
14
49
that a writer’s lack of attention to discourse communities’ conventions draws “attention
to the gap between the text at hand and the qualities of text [the reader expects]” (4). This
will result in instructors giving less credit to the author and, by extension, greater distance
between the writer and the discourse community.
Anne Beaufort’s research has further revealed that, despite these lofty goals, the
aspirations of the WPA and NCTE do not always trickle down to the composition
classrooms. While researching her case study at a “prestigious private university in the
South,” Beaufort reveals that during a committee meeting on undergraduate studies, a
committee member stated the following:
freshman writing courses serve two educational functions. [The first]…is
to improve the skills of freshman in writing, argumentation, and library
research. The second is to give graduate students in English an opportunity
to develop skills in teaching an undergraduate composition course. (A
third function is to provide financial support for graduate students in
English). (College Writing 29)
Beaufort’s research provides yet another example of how out of touch administrators and,
at times, faculty members can be regarding first-year composition. What is perhaps most
disheartening about this research is that it is not an isolated event. As previously
discussed, the majority of the current research indicates a serious difference between how
administrators view the roles and priorities of first-year composition, and what first-year
composition instructors see as the value of such as mandatory course.
50
Some students seem to have different expectations than faculty and
administrators’ as to the role that first-year composition plays in their academic
development. In a study longitudinal study conducted by Nancy Sommers and Laura
Saltz, which followed four hundred students at Harvard University over the course of
their undergraduate degrees, the researchers found that students felt the value of writing
during their freshman year was contained to their ability to begin to assimilate into the
academic milieu by exploring their communities through writing. The researchers
concluded at the end of the study that, “the enthusiasm so many freshman feel is less for
writing per se than for the way it helps to locate them in the academic culture, giving
them a sense of academic belonging” (131). One student observed as a senior that the
writing she did as a freshman was like being asked “‘to build a house without any tools’”
(131). This suggests that while the student may have felt challenged by the task of
academic writing during her freshman year, she nonetheless recognized the benefits of
setting a goal beyond merely passing an assignment. She recognized that investing
herself in developing writing tools would have lasting significance for her academic
career and beyond. The student’s response echoes David Bartholomae’s argument that
students must be taught to appropriate academic discourse or risk being appropriated by it
(3). This student recognized her status as a novice while simultaneously envisioning
herself as an expert, as someone qualified to participate in the academic conversation.
Sommers and Saltz’s student-participants also demonstrated that, while students
risk being forced into the binary identities of plagiarist or the honest student, students can
51
envision more complex identities when instructors create spaces where students can
envision multiple identities for themselves as members of diverse academic discourse
communities.
What Should First-year Composition Emphasize?
I agree with researchers such as Reeves (1997), Scott (1997) and LeCourt (2006)
who argue that, instead of focusing first-year students on assignments centered on literary
analysis, outdated and general research assignments, or activities which center on
learning the writing process, instructors need to be preparing students to speak as experts
in discourse communities in the university. This has been reinforced by the WPA, which
has stated that students “should learn common formats for different kinds of
texts…develop knowledge of genre conventions…and practice appropriate means of
documenting their work” (“Outcome Statement”). J. Blake Scott, for example, has found
that by integrating literacy narratives into first-year composition classrooms, students can
“expand their notions of what ‘counts’ as writing and help them contextualize their
writing and its effects” (110). In order for students to begin to see themselves as an expert
within a community, they must first understand the diverse discourse communities that
students are a part of and surrounded by. As Scott demonstrates, this beginning work can
be accomplished through the genre of literacy narratives, which helps students to “expand
their definitions of literacy and writing, and thus their definitions of themselves as
writers” (112). This awareness is crucial to students’ integration and full participation in
academic discourse communities. The better they understand that writing is situated with
52
the conversations of communities, the better students will be able to respond to the
writing assignments given them in the university and engage in the dialogue of their
communities.
Like Scott (1997), LaVona Reeves (1997) has argued that incorporating
investigations into discourse communities will help students see themselves as situated
writers. Reeves, however, extends the benefits of this pedagogy to include students who
are apprehensive toward writing. Writing apprehension, as defined by Lester Faigley,
John A. Daly, and Stephen Witte, is the “tendency to experience high degrees of anxiety
when asked to write, resulting in an approach-avoidance conflictive state which manifests
itself in one’s behavior, attitudes, and written products” (qtd. in Reeves 38). This anxiety,
while stemming from myriad sources, and which may linger with students temporarily or
for long-term periods, can be mitigated when students are encouraged to develop their
metacognitive awareness of how they feel about writing within many different discourse
communities (Reeves 43).15 The more students understand something that seems foreign,
the more comfortable with it they become. When these feelings of otherness are coupled
with a failure to see the preeminent role writing plays in all academic discourse
communities, students may be hesitant to apply themselves in their writing. Therefore, by
helping students see the relationship between writing and their chosen academic
discourse communities, not only will students be more inclined to value academic
15
Developing an awareness of discourse communities is not Reeves’s only solution for helping
students through their writing apprehension. Her 1997 research as published in The English Journal
highlights seventeen different suggestions to help combat writing apprehension in students.
53
writing, they may become better prepared for the writing situations found in the
university.
Donna LeCourt’s approach to the question of how to minimize alienation extends
beyond the alienation of joining the university to the specific area of working-class
student identities. This method provides further benefits of approaching the writing
classroom through the lens of discourse communities. LeCourt argues for composition
classrooms framed in terms of performative theory by employing pedagogy that “rather
than solving the ‘problem’ of class by making class identities the topic for writing, we
attend more closely to how we structure the interactive contexts through which class is
produced in our classrooms” (45, author’s emphasis). Here LeCourt offers an additional
way of integrating discourse communities into the classroom. Her mode of inquiry,
however, is not to make classes (and their attending discourses) the “what” in the writing
classroom, but rather to make them the lens of investigation as the students excavate the
implied social identities in the rhetorical situations of academic writing. In LeCourt’s
words, an examination into performative class identities in academic writing allows her
to “present writing as a constantly moving target, one where style, genre, and, most
important, author position are constantly changing and continually open to multiple
options” (47). Here LeCourt provides yet another case for focusing college composition
classes on questions of authorship and discourse communities. Students who are assisted
in developing the critical awareness of the tenuous and often shifting relationship
54
between student and academic discourse communities will be better prepared to write
among these communities and to engage as a member of them.
To add to these researchers’ existing classroom approaches to integrating
discourse communities, I believe that class time needs to be dedicated to explicating the
‘hows’ and ‘why’s of academic honesty and authorship, and furthermore, that these
concepts should be made part of regular classroom discussions. By emphasizing the
contextual nature of writing and citation, and the varying definitions and values of
authorship within diverse discourse communities, instructors of first-year composition
can better prepare students for the requirements of writing within their chosen discourse
communities.
Conclusion
Students come to the university in hopes of acquiring the language and skills of
new discourse communities, even if they don’t use these terms. For most, the promise of
future careers in any of these communities is also accompanied by a need to acquire new
ways of writing and thinking in order to communicate with peers in these discourse
communities. Nevertheless, plagiarism, citation, and academic honesty as of yet are not
viewed as important components of students’ ability to integrate into these discourse
communities. I have argued thus far that these issues are central to how student writers
are viewed in academic discourse communities, and that first-year composition
instruction can play a great role in helping students to develop identities of membership
within these discourse communities.
55
If the goal of first-year composition courses is to prepare students to engage in
academic writing, then the course objectives, pedagogies, and assignments must reflect
the dynamic array of different genres, conventions, and types of writing that will be
expected of students in future courses. Additionally, the goals and expectations for firstyear composition need to be refined in order to meet the intertextualilty of discourse
communities of the university. This can be accomplished, in part, by spending more time
enabling students to practice with citation and academic honesty, as well as allowing
students to discuss these issues in depth through conversation with one another, and
through their writing. Through these discussions, students will hopefully acquire new
insight and understanding about the many ways they can represent themselves as writers
and as members of the academic discourse community. In the succeeding chapters, I will
present an analysis of some of the documents used by CSUS for first-year composition,
as well as propose guidelines for first-year composition that can be implemented which
will help teach students about academic honesty and citation practices.
56
Chapter 3
RESEARCH FINDINGS
The writer’s motive is the most important element in the activity of writing.
-- David Bleich
Introduction
In the preceding chapter, I discussed the connection between student and
administrative attitudes toward plagiarism, the goals of first-year composition, and the
importance of students fully integrating into their chosen academic discourse
communities, ultimately leading to the conclusion that the three are inextricably
connected. Specifically, I have argued that students will be better equipped to write as a
member of their chosen academic discourse communities by making authorship,
plagiarism, and academic honesty central to first-year composition classrooms.
In this chapter, I will provide a more detailed analysis of the ways in which
plagiarism is currently taught in first-year composition and discuss to what extent each
pedagogy helps students integrate into the discourse communities on campus. In order to
accomplish this task, I have requested all first-year composition instructors for the Fall
2011 semester answer a short questionnaire and provide me with copies of their first-year
composition syllabi.16 Utilizing this data, I will compare current teaching practices of
CSUS instructors with the three pedagogical approaches outlined by Michael Davis, a
philosophy professor who teaches workplace ethics. As a senior fellow at the Center for
16
See Methodology section in this Chapter.
57
the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Davis wrote
an article for the journal Teaching Philosophy in 1990 titled “Who Can Teach Workplace
Ethics?” The article explores several ways in which workplace ethics (to which we can
accurately ascribe plagiarism conventions) can be taught in the classroom. The argument
for teaching professional ethics at the university seems to be plain and straightforward—
it seems necessary to acquaint students with the ethical issues and standards of their
chosen professions and academic discourse communities during their first introductions
to the university environment. This will help students to develop important research and
synthesis techniques in low stakes situations, and help them better understand how to
communicate as a member of their chosen discourse communities. My argument is that if
students are to become members of these communities, it is vital that they begin to
understand the ethical issues in writing—including attribution and citation, as well as
how to collaborate with other writers and texts—earlier in their academic careers.
Methodology
For this thesis, I requested participation of all English faculty members assigned
to teach at least one section of English 1A for the Fall 2011 semester.17 Each instructor
received in his/her faculty mailbox an Informed Consent information and signature page
(attached as Appendix A), the Instructor Questionnaire (Appendix B), and were invited to
participate in individual interviews (potential interview questions are included as
Appendix C). Of the twenty-nine instructors scheduled to teach English 1A during the
17
CSUS Institutional Review Board Approved Protocol Number 11-12-012
58
Fall 2011 semester, only six chose to participate. Responses were collected between
September and October of 2011.
Limitations
Since Davis is a professor of philosophy, his framework does have some
limitations when applied to composition studies. For example, much of his data is drawn
from extensive interviews with mostly vocational instructors. This leads Davis to
question the ways in which vocational students are prepared for the ethical implications
of their chosen occupations. While this research setting is different than the composition
classroom, his findings do have applicability to first-year composition. Mainly, his
research seeks to define ways instructors teach students about ethics, regardless of the
discourse community. In other words, he seeks to make general statements about
effective and ineffective pedagogies utilized by the instructors he has researched.
Additionally, Davis’s background as a professor of philosophy also means that his
discourse community does not share all of the same values as composition. For example,
Davis’s research does not necessarily support or discuss how collaboration or processbased classrooms can help students understand the ethics of their discourse communities.
Finally, Davis’s framework does not account for writing components of any classroom,
and I will therefore propose some ways, based on current composition research, to apply
this principle to a writing classroom.
It is not my intent in utilizing Davis’s framework to argue that the goals of firstyear composition should be changed to resemble those of a course that focuses on
59
professional or vocational writing. Rather, Davis’s “workplace ethics” refer to the
“[standards] of conduct that, all things considered, every member of a particular group
wants every other to follow even if their following them would mean he too has to follow
them” (Davis 26). This standard of conduct is not just limited to one workplace
environment; as Davis later argues, a “workplace” is not “a family, a neighborhood,
church, or school. Though workplaces differ much among themselves, they are generally
less personal…less interested in the individual” (30). Instead of investigating a specific
business organization, we can apply Davis’s framework to individual discourse
communities. Thus, while Davis refers to “workplace ethics,” for our purposes we can
consider them the ethical concepts of writing of individual discourse communities, an
investigation that is very much a concern of composition today. More specifically, my
intent in using Davis’s framework is to explore what modes of teaching do not help
students understanding of discourse community ethics, and what first-year composition
instructors can do to improve how they teach plagiarism in first-year composition.
Davis’s framework will be further reinforced by various critical scholars of
composition18 who argue for changes to the ways that teachers present plagiarism in the
classroom. The framework posited by Davis is useful in that it breaks down the various
pedagogical approaches that instructors can take in presenting discourse community
ethics and analyzes the usefulness of each approach. As I will demonstrate, evidence of
the three major pedagogical approaches presented by Davis can be found in first-year
18
Chris Anson, for example, has utilized a similar approach for teaching plagiarism.
60
composition classes at CSUS, and have varying degrees of effectiveness in aiding
students in understanding academic honesty, authorship, and the role these play in many
writing contexts in the university.
The main limitation to this thesis is the size of the survey population. Of the
twenty-nine instructors who were assigned to teach sections of first-year composition
(English 1A) courses for the Fall 2011 semester, only six chose to participate in this
study. Despite the relatively low percentage of participation (20.6% of the first-year
composition faculty), the responses collected by participants still demonstrate the various
practices that can be utilized by instructors when teaching plagiarism, and therefore
provide valuable insight into current teaching practices with the English Department at
CSUS.
First-year Composition
I will argue that by treating plagiarism and academic honesty as discourse
community ethics in first-year composition classrooms, instructors can better assist
students in entering academic discourse communities at the university. While the WPA
has stated that plagiarism is a “multifaceted and ethically complex problem,” others have
been less eager to call plagiarism an ethical issue because it can be easy to conflate the
ethical consideration with the implication that it is a moral issues as well (“Defining”).
Kathryn Valentine makes this observation in her work “Plagiarism as Literacy Practice”
by stating the following:
61
academic honesty codes…prescribe correct behavior universally as though
there is one set way to cite and document that good, honest, and ethical
students will follow. In regards to such policies, students’ choices are limited.
They are often reduced to rule following as a way of achieving morality.
This sense of morality is similar to what Zygmunt Bauman calls an ethical
morality—an ethical morality is one 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. (92)
The conflation of the ethical and moral implications of plagiarism has been disastrous.
Not only does it criminalize students for deeds which lack the intent to deceive, it has
also penalized students, at times, for being beginners,19 and enforces a false identity on
all students consistent with the moral turpitude assigned to thieves and plagiarizers.
Some authors, such as Valentine, further contend that classifying plagiarism as an
ethical issue is inadequate on the basis that it does not account for student agency. Such
an argument insists that in both intentional and unintentional cases of plagiarism, under
the regime of the ethical conceptualization of plagiarism, students “are characterized as
making a choice, but only a choice of following the rules or not rather than a choice of
how to represent themselves and the knowledge they are using and constructing”
(Valentine 92). In other words, students do not have a real choice to make, since the
choice consists of either (a) conforming student writing to the expectations of the group
19
This is also previously discussed in Chapter 2.
62
or (b) choosing to not cite and attribute sources properly, which is laden with harsh
penalties and possibly a stigmatized identity (the plagiarist). However, by resituating
plagiarism as a discourse community ethic, students are empowered to understand why
they are asked to perform the conventions of attributing sources, which can be followed
up with an increased space within the classroom for students to understand how
attribution affects their ethos as writers writing for their chosen discourse communities.
In classrooms that resituate plagiarism as a discourse community ethic, students
will be exposed to the localized understanding of citation and attribution, as well as the
penalties associated with violations within their discourse community. This would, in
turn, empower students to exercise their agency. Students could better understand that
there is not one correct and monolithic form of citation that must be mastered, but that
there are many ways of representing a writer’s interaction with the ongoing conversations
of the discourse community.
In order to understand plagiarism as a discourse community ethic, we must also
consider whose ethical concern it is. When contextualized in this respect, it becomes
apparent that plagiarism is just as much an ethical question for instructors as it is for
students. Rebecca Moore Howard has stated, teaching students the fluidity and
complexity of issues of utilizing source texts with students’ own ideas, and enabling
students to distinguish between synthesis and practices such as patchwriting (a form of
plagiarism):
63
requires a pedagogy far more sophisticated than instruction in the mere
mechanics of citation conventions. It requires instructors to accept ethical
responsibility for their students’ learning, instead of settling for the empty
ceremony of teaching citation conventions. (“Ethics” 87)
Part of accepting this ethical responsibility of composition instruction requires instructors
to assist students in fully understanding the implications of authorship, attribution, and
academic honesty when students write and utilize sources.
Citation and attribution are only part of the ethical questions that writers in any
discourse community must consider. The writing situation (including the ethical aspects)
further becomes more complicated for students when first-year composition instructors
recognize (and explain) that all discourse communities have similar and conflicting
ethical considerations. To highlight this configuration, we can look to the ways that
different discourse communities define “common knowledge” discussed in the University
Academic Honesty Policy. Since the Policy does not define the criteria for what common
knowledge is, it is up to each discipline, if not each instructor, to determine what
information is common knowledge within that discourse community, and does not need
citing in student writing. This lack of uniformity can be confusing to students. If they are
not made aware early in their academic careers that this aspect of plagiarism is
disciplinarily (if not instructor) driven, they may be careless in assuming information that
they include in their writing is common knowledge. A first-year student, for example,
might assume that it is common knowledge that the human heart has four chambers. If
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the student were to write that in an assignment for a nursing course and not provide
citations, for example, it would be up to his/her instructor to determine if the student had
plagiarized part of his/her paper. On the other hand, a student who is provided with
substantial instruction on citation, plagiarism and authorship might be more hesitant to
assume he/she knows what is common knowledge within the discipline, and hopefully
more likely to get help or provide citations. When students can read texts, come into
dialogue with these texts, and clearly demonstrate the ability to attribute and
acknowledge sources in their writings, it builds the student’s ethos and becomes another
argument for his/her admission into the academic community.
Discourse Ethics and Workplace Ethics
Lisa M. Toner argues in her article “The Implications of Discourse Ethics” that in
writing classrooms, the ethical concerns are less about the subject matter or the writing
assignments, and more a matter of how instructors “[effect] dialogue in the classroom to
enable discussion and critique of competing interpretive stances” (4). This leads us to the
understanding that part of a writing instructor’s success is reliant upon to what extent
he/she fosters genuine discussion among students that allow critical dissent of hegemonic
ideas and institutions. This may be manifested in the classroom by students
deconstructing academic honesty policies as a way of thinking critically about the
institution of which students are members. In asking students to analyze the policies that
directly relate to students, not only would it show students that first-year composition
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faculty values critical thinking and welcomes dissent, it would invite students to think
analytically about what it means to be a member of the academic community.
The dynamics of the classroom must also provide a space for students to do
something with their dissent. In other words, even if students feel they have
deconstructed the hegemonic institutions that surround and possibly subjugate them, they
must also be empowered to do something with it through some other means, such as
writing about it. For these students, as well as those who may subscribe to the hegemonic
status quo, what is gained is a greater ability to critically think, critically read, and
critically write which, according to James A. Berlin is necessary for participation in a
democratic society.
Berlin argues in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures that “language practices…are
inscribed with ideological prescriptions, interpretations of experience that reinforce
conceptions of what really exists, what is really good, and what is politically possible”
(93). The academic honesty policies of all universities are equally charged with political
messages about the assumed identity and status of students. More important for this
discussion, however, is Berlin’s argument that ideology prescribes what is politically
possible or, in other words, what individuals with different political statuses are capable
of accomplishing. Berlin’s argument that social-epistemic rhetoric is preferable to other
social rhetorics is in part based in the rhetoric’s emphasis that when writers deconstruct
their subjects, it “is a construction, a fabrication, established through the devices of the
signifying practices” (88). Berlin’s argument reinforces the value of making academic
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honesty and authorship central to first-year composition. If asked to consider these issues
in depth, students will be able to see what political identities are possible under the
Academic Honesty Policy (plagiarists, members of the academic discourse community,
etc.), and what the university expects of students. This approach to first-year composition
would transform citation and attribution from rote tasks that annoy or confuse students to
rhetorical strategies that become part of the signifying practices of student writers.
Students can be brought to see themselves as producers of texts who are aware of what
authorial identities they portray through their writing when they utilize (or fail to utilize)
the signifying practices of writing. Attribution can then signify to the academic
community that the student has established his/her point through research, that the
author’s argument is supported and thorough, and even that he/she should be granted
membership in the discourse community.
The concept of discourse community ethics has also been applied by other
scholars to plagiarism in the first-year composition classroom. Chris Anson, for example,
has employed John Bigg’s approach to teaching pedagogies as a way of describing the
responsibilities of instructors in teaching issues of academic honesty. According to
Anson, Biggs’ model includes three levels that focus on the student-teacher dynamic in
varying degrees. In level one, the teacher focuses on what the students are (their abilities,
their lack of abilities, etc) (Anson 143). In terms of teaching plagiarism in first-year
composition, level one might be an instructor who assumes that students have learned
about citation and academic honesty in previous courses or in high school, and therefore
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does not teach them about plagiarism and attribution. Level one could also manifest in an
instructor who assumes he/she knows what students are (plagiarists) and therefore
requires all students to submit work through plagiarism-checking software. In both of
these instances, the instructor’s classroom choices are governed solely by what he/she
believes students are, a static identity that cannot be changed (in the examples, the
assumed identities are students prepared for writing in the academic community, and
students as plagiarists, respectively). Level one is problematic for students because it
does not provide a space for them to imagine new and more complex identities for
themselves, including an identity of membership with academic discourse communities.20
Biggs’ level two is a slightly more dynamic approach concerned with the
transmission of concepts and understanding on the parts of the students, while level three
(the most dialogic of the three levels) focuses on the “confluence of what the teacher
does, who the students are, and, most importantly, what the students do to learn” (Anson
143-144). The major difference between a level one approach and a level two approach is
that level one does not provide for students to grow and progress. It imagines that
students have static identities, while level two seems to assume that, through the use
positive instruction such as course lectures, students can grow and develop. A classroom
that employs the level two approach might see the instructor providing lectures or
material on citing and attributing sources, without any discussion or even practical
application for students. Level two, therefore, focuses on providing information with the
20
This will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
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assumption that students are prepared to utilize and apply that information in their own
writing.
Level three, however, is the best approach for first-year composition instructors
because it approaches ethical issues, such as plagiarism, with an awareness of the
rhetorical situation within which the students and instructor are operating. An instructor
that employs a level-three approach will consider, as Biggs suggests, “what the students
do to learn” (Anson 144). In a writing classroom, an instructor might utilize several
different modes of learning, such as freewriting or journal writing on plagiarism and
citation, in addition to practice exercises that focus on incorporating quotations or
summarizing texts, classroom or group discussions, and even workshops to help students
cite in their writing. In other words, instructor who utilize a level three approach consider
the many ways that students learn, and takes advantage of a variety of different activities
to help students develop a better understanding of the ethics of writing. Such instructors
will not consider it sufficient to assume students know how to cite sources (level one
approach), or only provide information on citing sources without context (level two).
Biggs’ model is similar to the model that Davis proposes in that both models
require that instructors consider the ethical implications embedded in their pedagogical
choices. When it comes to plagiarism and academic citation, instructors should take the
road of level three and incorporate it into their own classrooms.
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How Discourse Ethics Should be Taught
Instructors that make discourse ethics a central part of their classroom will not
only better prepare students to become members of their chosen academic discourse
communities, they will also work toward fulfilling the course goals set for first-year
composition. According to the Course Description created by the CSUS English
Department for English 1A, first-year composition is designed as “an intensive writing
course that provides students with practice in the kinds of challenging thinking, reading,
and writing required in academic discourse” (“Course Descriptions”). Additionally, since
first-year composition serves in part as an introduction to the academic community, firstyear composition faculty members include course goals in their syllabi that aim at
accomplishing this task. One instructor (Participant E), created the course goal for his/her
students that they will “learn about, discuss, and practice rhetorical strategies, using them
to write effectively in a variety of genres,” while another instructor (Participant A) states
that his/her students will “gain awareness of the various uses of language” by the end of
the semester. Instructors should include detailed analysis and discussion of ethical
concerns like plagiarism and academic honesty because such discussions help students
understand how conventions influence students’ identities. This reinforcement can help
students develop a writing process that utilizes a range of rhetorical strategies to help
students develop the most effective writing for any given situation.
Instructors need to be constantly self-reflective of the effectiveness of their
pedagogies. And, while most first-year composition instructors are sensitive to this need,
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many may not yet consider the need to be self-reflective of the ways in which authorship
and plagiarism are presented in the classroom. My goal here is to present different ways
that discourse ethics can be taught and illustrate each. According to Davis, a workplace
ethic (such as attribution and citation) can be taught in three modes, described as:
1.
2.
3.
The way of prudence;
The way of morality; or,
The way of ethics.
These three categories represent a hierarchy of approaches. The way of prudence is the
least effective pedagogy for teaching ethics, while the way of ethics is the most effective.
I will argue that, while the way of prudence and the way of morality are common
pedagogical approaches to teaching citation and attribution, there are ways of integrating
the way of ethics into first-year composition.
The Way of Prudence
As Davis describes, the way of prudence is present in a classroom when an
instructor explains what is “right and wrong in terms of what the employer, the law, or
the profession wants and what will happen if one disobeys” (30). In other words, all that
this kind of teaching provides students with is a general explanation of what the
authorities (teachers, departments, the university in general) expect of students and what
punishments are possible.
This pedagogy might also appear in the absence of any positive dialogue or
discussion about plagiarism, authorship or attribution. When first-year composition
instructors consider plagiarism as obvious or already understood by students, instructors
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reinforce the implied message of the way of prudence—that students should already
understand plagiarism, and if they don’t, they should attempt to conform their practices in
order to avoid penalty.
One research participant (Participant B), when asked what kinds of questions
he/she pose to his/her students when discussing plagiarism with students replied, “I don’t
pose questions. I just ask if they have any questions about plagiarism.” This attitude
embodies the way of prudence approach to teaching plagiarism. The lack of discussion
and dialogue may also reinforce to students who do not understand plagiarism that their
identity or status as a novice writer is also a negative attribute. In this scenario, instead of
portraying students’ status as an opportunity to learn about conventions and discourse
ethics, as well as an opportunity for growth, their status becomes a point of deficiency
and shame. This instructor’s syllabus also does not address convention use or citation as
course goals for students to accomplish. This may serve as an additional point that, in
order to develop better classroom practices, instructors should include course goals that
relate to the development of citation practices.
This pedagogical approach has several important shortcomings. To return to
Davis, the teaching of ethics via the way of prudence only requires the instructor to know
“what the employer, the law, or the profession wants (and can enforce)” (31), and it
requires of students all the burden of discovering the nuances, implications, and
repercussions of violations to the ethical rule. This first pedagogical approach is perhaps
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the weakest of the three presented by Davis in that it prepares students the least to begin
to engage in their discourse communities.
Another place where the way of prudence as a pedagogy appears in the first-year
writing classroom is in the dialogue instructors create among one another and with their
students. National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Heather Dunn Macadam, who also
works as an adjunct undergraduate writing instructor, has discussed her experience with
student plagiarism on the air. While speaking on air about her feelings on the issue of
student plagiarism, Macadam has used a tone of disdain directed to students. In relating
one interaction of suspected student plagiarism, it seemed to her as if her student had
“forgotten how to open his textbook. And if he had done that, he might’ve learned how to
[properly cite sources] instead of failing my class” (“Plagiarism”). Macadam seems to
conclude that the responsibility to discover all aspects of plagiarism and citation is the
sole responsibility of students, and that such responsibility can be accomplished by
simply reading a textbook chapter or handbook, while the only obligation of the
instructor is to “pounce on…unsuspecting prey” while preparing to discuss a potential
instance of plagiarism with a student (“Plagiarism”).
Way of Morality
The second approach to teaching ethics as presented by Davis is the way of
morality. Where the way of prudence outlines the rule and the consequences (in their
periphery), the way of morality seeks to describe the ethical issue in terms of a moral
question. The example Davis utilizes is if an employer were to state the following to a
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new employee: “‘you should arrive on time because taking the job is an implicit promise
to be prompt and you don’t want to break a promise, do you?’” (30) The example
demonstrates an appeal to a newcomer’s hopes of meeting the expectations required of
them, without demonstrating how those expectations are to be accomplished.
Likewise, first-year composition students are presented with the way of morality
when they are told, explicitly or implicitly, “you should carefully cite the sources you use
in your essay because you don’t want teachers to think you don’t know how to cite, do
you?” or when they are reminded that plagiarism is the stealing of another person’s words
or ideas, which is packed with the implicit assumption that stealing is wrong, and
therefore, they should not steal by way of plagiarism. One research participant
(Participant B) employs this mode of instruction (as well as the way of prudence) when
he/she states in his/her syllabus the following:
Academic Honesty: You are required to do your own work; this means no
plagiarizing. To plagiarize is to steal someone else’s work without giving
them credit. More importantly, you are only cheating yourself and thereby
not critically thinking to come up with your own ideas. See me if you are
unclear about plagiarizing. In addition, for in-depth information, please
visit the following website:
(http://library.csus.edu/content2.asp?pageID=35).
The definition utilized by this instructor suggests only a very basic understanding of what
plagiarism entails, and offers students only a small amount of information. Granted, it is
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difficult to provide substantive instruction or materials in a syllabus, but the definition
portrayed only addresses half of the plagiarism issue. Here the instructor utilizes the way
of prudence by merely explaining the rule without any additional support. In the next
sentence, the instructor moves to the way of morality mode of instruction by framing the
issue of plagiarism in terms of what a student should do. The instructor applies pathos by
turning the cheating element onto the student by suggesting it is the plagiarizing student
who is robbed more than the source. This is followed by a brief homily regarding the
importance of critical thinking.
Another problem with this element of the instructor’s syllabus is that this short
passage decontextualized from the course as a whole. The instructor does attempt to
connect the course to the policy by informing the student that he/she will lose out of the
opportunity to employ critical thinking by plagiarism, the connection is not made explicit.
If the instructor had related the importance of critical thinking to the values of the
academic discourse community, it would have made his/her approach more aligned with
the way of ethics, which will be described later.
One way that an instructor could change something as simple as a syllabus is to
introduce any material on academic honesty or plagiarism with a brief introduction that
discusses why these concepts are important to the class and to the discourse community.
This will help to contextualize any material provided, which can in turn help students
embrace these concepts as areas for them to learn and grow throughout the semester, and
an additional justification for why students should take these concepts seriously.
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Introduction to the Panopticon
An additional problem with presenting plagiarism through the way of prudence or
the way of morality is their inherent relationship with Foucault’s discussion of the
panopticon. Michel Foucault’s seminal 1975 work titled Discipline & Punish: The Birth
of the Prison continues to inform our discipline today. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault
describes a type of prison created by Jeremy Bentham, which consisted of this primary
architectural feature:
at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is
pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the
peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole
width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside,
corresponding to the windows of the tower, the other, on the outside,
allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is
needed, then, is to place a supervisor in the central tower and to shut up in
each cell a … condemned man. (200)
The result of this architectural construction is that the light which comes from the
exterior window and into the cell is reflected off the window of the central tower,
creating the illusion of backlighting. This results in visibility from the inside of the tower
into all cells, but denies the ability to see into the tower from the periphery (200). The
goal of the panopticon, as described by Foucault, is to force the prisoners to comply with
the rules of the watcher. This is accomplished by making the watched believe he or she is
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under constant surveillance, thus creating a constant “state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic function of power” (201). In other words, the
watched, aware that he or she is under constant surveillance from the unseen watcher,
begins to conform his/her behavior to that of the watcher, under the belief that at any
moment, if a violation is committed by the watched, the watcher will appear with
punishment.
The long-term effect of exposure to the panopticon is that the prisoner conforms
so well to the watcher’s behavior that, after a while, there is no need for a watcher to be
present at all times. In this state, Foucault argues that “a real subjugation is born
mechanically from a fictitious relation” (202). Using the prison as an example, the way
the panopticon works is as follows: inmates may be warned upon entering the panopticon
that a particular behavior, such as arguing with adjoining cellmates is not allowed and is
punished by a certain penalty. The inmate, unable to see the guards in the watchtower,
may at times be tempted to argue with a neighbor in a cell. If the guard is present in the
tower, he can swiftly detect the behavior and adjudicate punishment. After some days or
months of being subject to punishment for misbehavior, the inmate will be lulled into
believing that at any moment, the guard is watching him or her and thus dissuade the
inmate from committing behavioral violations and, after longer, it will no longer be
necessary for a guard to be present in the tower at all times.
This power construct is an efficient way of enforcing power on the subjugated. If
the watchers can convince the watched of their constant surveillance then:
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he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, assumes
responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play
spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in
which he plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
(202-203, emphasis added)
In other words, the watched individual becomes his own watcher, having integrated so
completely the power relationship into his own consciousness. This attitude of creating
the watcher in the consciousness of the watched is precisely the seemingly apparent goal
of the policies and presentation of plagiarism at many universities.
Diagnosing Panopticism in the University
While many have considered the accessibility of technology and the internet in
schools as a giant leap in opportunity and accessibility of information, the technological
schema utilized to provide these tools have been described as inherently panoptic in
function. This can be seen when students and faculty are required to register and log-on
to databases, networks, online class forums, and internet functions, which results in “an
electronic trail far more permanent and conspicuous than the ephemerality of cyberspace
would suggest” (Selwyn 249). Despite the monitoring function of such technology, most
administrators argue that monitoring is vital to the continued success of these
technologies to monitor students’ activities for inappropriate conduct (downloading
unstable and virus-laden documents for example). Nonetheless, it also creates a panoptic
atmosphere for students. The use of online classroom discussion boards is evidence of
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this dynamic. While some instructors encourage students to use discussion boards to
openly discuss their thoughts, questions and reactions to texts and classroom activities,
students are also aware that instructors police these boards for content. This risks making
students less willing to being honest in their thoughts and writings. Furthermore, since
students do not know what content instructors will monitor, as Foucault suggests with the
panopticon, students may approach these writing situations with wariness before too
many keystrokes have even been entered.
While teacher lore often laments that the instances of plagiarism are on the rise
due to the accessibility of information through the internet, it has also been noted that
“there are others [statistical] figures that challenge whether plagiarism is rapidly
increasing, though these are more rarely reported in the mainstream media” (Williams
351). Despite this data, the narrative of lazy, deceitful young people continues to
“[dominate] public conversations about this issue, as well as the conversations among
many literacy teachers” (351). Here Williams argues the same point that I have made—
the depiction of all student plagiarists as ‘lazy’ and ‘deceitful’ is nothing more than a
fiction, and yet it continues to pervade university rhetoric. It would be foolish to deny
that a student who submits a paper purchased online as his own might fit the description
of deceitful and lazy, but the narrative does not work for the many more students who
commit acts that constitute plagiarism because they do not understand of the rules of
citation or the importance of attribution and citation. A more accurate portrayal of these
students is as a novice new-hires entering a new workplace. They do not yet understand
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that rules of the workplace and, therefore, need assistance in fully comprehending (and
thereby adhering) to them. However, most universities have yet to adopt this more
reasonable portrayal of students, and continue to utilize panopticon-like apparatuses of
power to enforce compliance with citation and academic honesty.
The most obvious form of the panopticon at the university is in the form of
plagiarism detection software. This technology functions by requiring students or faculty
to upload student papers to the software’s database, which compares the submitted work
to the database’s wide range of material retrieved from the internet and from previously
submitted work (once a student submits a written essay to the site, the paper is made part
of the database’s permanent archives for comparison in the future). The most common
plagiarism detection software, turnitin.com functions as a watcher by:
[inviting] instructors to have students post all their work on the site, under
the argument that doing so will stop students from cheating because they'll
know that every time they upload a paper it will be checked …But this
approach is akin to learning how to drive for the first time by always being
tailed by a state trooper. (Carbone 1)
In other words, Carbone argues that by forcing students to undergo the surveillance of
plagiarism detection software, the students are placed into a position of subjugation and
fear.
The consequences of this power dynamic can be detrimental to students. Instead
of attempting to engage with the texts on which their writing assignments are based, or
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the texts the students have found through research because they are afraid to cite them
incorrectly, students may revert to formulaic and unimaginative texts. And, while
formulaic and unimaginative student writing may be enough for students to pass some
courses, it does not prepare students to engage in the dialogue of the university or meet
the needs of the WPA’s Outcomes for First-Year Composition. This will, in turn, render
students ill-prepared to act as agents of their writing within their discourse communities.
A better pedagogical approach to first-year composition is to employ Davis’ way of
ethics in all aspects of first-year composition classrooms.
The Way of Ethics
If David Bleich is correct in asserting that the “writer’s motive is the most
important element in the activity of writing,” then instructors must give students the
tools to help them assume the identity and motivations of engaged and informed
members of the discourse community, instead of relegating students the identity of the
lazy, thieving plagiarist. Davis’s way of ethics attempts to enable this transformation by
encouraging instructors to address ethical issues in their multi-dimensional and complex
natures. The way of ethics accomplishes this in part by addressing the ethic in terms of
how it affects all members of the community, not just the individual being taught (Davis
31). A first-year composition instructor might begin to foster this understanding in his or
her students by encouraging students to discuss how plagiarism affects how other
members of the students’ discourse community. One research participant (Participant A)
frames the issue of plagiarism in his/her syllabus by connecting it with the idea of
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professionalism within the academic discourse community. This particular syllabus states
that, “as a student of this course (and of this university) you are expected to maintain a
high degree of professionalism. Such professionalism includes a commitment to active
learning and class participation.” This passage is followed in the syllabus by an excerpt
from the CSUS Academic Honesty Policy that illustrates that “truth and honesty…[are]
fundamental to a community of scholars and teachers.” While Participant B’s use of
Davis’s way of morality (as previously discussed) does begin to connect plagiarism with
the values of the university, Participant A’s use of the way of ethics makes this
connection for students in a more concrete fashion. Participant A accomplishes this by
contextualizing the values within the classroom setting, not just within the broad scope of
the university. What becomes apparent from these two instructors is that the connection
between the values of first-year composition and academic honesty can be made for
students in many different areas of the classroom. This relationship can further be
established from the beginning of the semester when instructors carefully consider and
craft their course syllabi.
Another CSUS instructor creates a classroom atmosphere that emulates the way
of ethics as he/she discusses plagiarism and citation with first-year composition students.
This instructor (Participant D) utilizes not only classroom lectures, but also in-class
discussions and videos to assist students in understanding the importance of “proper
citation techniques” and how to avoid plagiarism. This instructor, when asked what kinds
of questions he/she poses to his/her students, responded that “discussions…usually
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revolve around values” and begin with questions such as “why do we cite, why do we
need to avoid plagiarism,” which develop into conversations about “student writer’s ethos
and how using texts/entering the academic conversation requires that their writing should
demonstrate the ability to participate in that conversation rather than merely report on the
conversation.” This approach is more aligned with Davis’s way of ethics because the
instructor asks students to consider for themselves why they should properly cite sources
in a way that is relevant to the first-year composition classroom. The instructor also
utilizes concepts that are important to first-year composition, such as the rhetorical appeal
of ethos, and how students can begin to build their own ethos in their writing. By learning
and exploring these concepts, students will exemplify critical and analytical thinking that
the WPA has argued first-year composition students should be able to demonstrate by the
end of the course—specifically, the WPA’s Outcome Statement that first-year
composition students be able, by the end of the course, to demonstrate an understanding
of the “relationships among language, knowledge, and power” (“Outcome Statement”).
Furthermore, the WPA’s position that first-year composition students “understand a
writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and
synthesizing appropriate … sources” also seems to be demonstrated when students can
exhibit an ability to analyze a text for various rhetorical features.
Developing Classrooms Centered on the Way of Ethics
As I have shown in the previous section, Davis’s way of ethics develops ethical
issues such as academic honesty and plagiarism in a more fulsome manner than other
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approaches. In classrooms that do not treat these issues in a complex and contextualized
manner, students are at risk of failing to understand the importance of exhibiting proper
citation and adherence to universities’ academic honesty policies. This may result in
students not fully integrating into academic discourse communities. Many instructors, on
the other hand, may want to develop this kind of classroom, but may not know how to
achieve it. Some may wonder how often they should be discussing citations and
plagiarism with their students, while others are concerned with how to get students to feel
invested in learning and demonstrating these attributes.
In order to address these kinds of concerns, I have developed a list of classroom
practices that may begin to help instructors answer these questions. These practices are
attached as Appendix D. One important consideration for instructors to keep in mind is
that students may feel more engaged or interested in these topics if instructors present
classroom instruction and activities that appeal to students’ interest in their social lives,
such as through current events and by discussing different genres and discourse
communities. This can also be accomplished through the use of multimedia as a way of
presenting plagiarism in the classroom. One activity that I use in my classroom to begin a
discussion of plagiarism is by showing a picture of a famous work of art, such as
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, followed by a picture of another artists’ parody,
imitation, or replica of the Mona Lisa. After viewing these images, students have an
opportunity to freewrite and then discuss with their peers whether or not the imitating
artist has plagiarized from Da Vinci. This activity has worked well in my classroom as a
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way to get students engaged with questions of authorship and plagiarism in other
discourse communities. These conversations tend to be lively and engaging, and offer, at
many times, opportunities to connect students’ ideas back to the kinds of writing students
write at the university. This is perhaps one way of getting students interested in the
conversation, which may assist in developing an investment in students to be more
conscious of the ways in which they utilize sources.21
Additional Research Findings
Among the study participants, there was no dominant response regarding the
number of times that plagiarism and/or citation are specifically taught in the first-year
composition classrooms. Two respondents stated that they specifically teach these issues
1-2 times per semester, two respondents declared they teach them 3-4 times per semester,
and the remaining two respondents said they specifically teach these concepts 5-6 times
per semester. There did not appear to be a correlation between the number of times per
semester that plagiarism and/or citation are taught and the methods used in the class to
teach these concepts. Of the six participants, the following methods were used in the
classrooms to teach students about plagiarism and/or citation:
21
More classroom ideas are included in Appendix D.
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What these responses indicate is that all instructors surveyed utilize classroom lectures,
which represents the least dialogic instructional method. Classroom lectures further seem
to embody the way of prudence or morality approaches to teaching ethics: lectures
typically consist of an instructor dispensing information that students are expected to
internalize and reproduce in some fashion (in an exam, in their writing, etc.). However,
the teaching methods utilized by the participating CSUS instructors are not solely within
the confines of the way of prudence or way of morality; all instructors also indicated that
they have students participate in large in-class discussions. Depending on the way such
discussions are conducted, they may embody a contextualized treatment of plagiarism
and citation practices. When asked what kinds of questions instructors pose to students
during in-class discusssions, most instructors indicate that they ask students questions
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about how students can avoid plagiarism, and why it is important in academic writing to
cite sources, while others discuss how citation influences students’ ethos in academic
writing. These lines of questioning are moving toward a more in-depth and
contextualized treatment of plagiarism and citation.
When asked how important it is to the instructors that students are presented with
instruction regarding plagiarism in English 1A,22 research participants responded as
follows:
The results indicate that all instructors at least consider teaching plagiarism and citation
moderately important, while a majority of respondents indicated that it is very important.
One instructor added to his/her response that it is essential for students to understand
A response of 1 indicated ‘not important’ and a 5 indicated ‘very important.’ One respondent
indicated a response of 4.5. This was rounded up to 5.
22
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these concepts. These results are not all that surprising. What is surprising, however, is
that of the two instructors who rated the importance as only a 3, one instructor
(Participant C) states in his/her syllabus a learning outcome for the students related to
citation. This instructor expects students, by the end of the course, to be able to “apply
MLA documentation format appropriately.” This learning outcome seems to be in
opposition to the instructor’s own belief about the importance of providing students with
instruction regarding plagiarism in English 1A, and may reinforce the idea that some
instructors believe students should come into first-year composition with an
understanding of how to properly cite sources. This is the only instructor to expressly
state that applying MLA is a learning outcome/course goal for students, although most
other instructors mention that students should develop rhetorical strategies and
conventions in their writing, under which citation may be included. It could also be that
this instructor adherese more to the WPA’s definition of plagiarism instead of the
University’s definition.23 Regardless of an instructor’s personal belief as to which
definition is better, it seems that, as a matter of practice, instructors should be teaching
students about the definitions and standards of academic honesty that govern how
students will be evaluated by other instructors, including the University policies.
Instructors’ Definitions of Plagiarism
One similarity that all instructors shared was their definitions of plagiarism. All
participating instructors reflected in their definitions that plagiarism involved
The WPA has specifically stated that it does not consider “misuse of sources,” including
incorrect citations, as acts of plagiarism.
23
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representing another’s ideas as the writer’s own. Two participants indicated that to them,
plagiarism involved an intentional representation that the idea in question is the writer’s
own. One instructor explicitly stated, “I do not consider the inability to cite sources an act
of plagiarism since that is something I should and do teach them” (Participant E). This
response is particularly intriguing as the instructor intentionally sets himself/herself at
odds with the University’s policy on plagiarism. This same instructor, when asked how
important it is that he/she provides students with instruction on plagiarism in English 1A,
ranked this as a five (very important).
Without further research with this participant, it is impossible to know if the
instructor ever informs students that incorrect citations are, in fact, a form of plagiarism
recognized by the university. If the instructor does not do so, he/she could be doing
students a disservice by not fully informing them about all forms of plagiarism
recognized by the university. This reinforces the importance of teaching students
explicitly what the University Academic Honesty Policy states are the responsibilities of
both instructors and students. If instructors do, however, teach students that other
departments or instructors may consider the inability to properly cite sources as a form of
plagiarism, they may have another opportunity to reinforce that attribution and academic
honesty do vary among discourse communities.
Conclusion
While many university administrators and faculty have determined that “in order
to win the war against plagiarism, institutions needed to adopt a more holistic and
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coordinated approach,” (Batane 3) it does not appear that comprehensive approaches to
the ethics of citation and attribution have trickled down to actual classroom practice, as
evidenced by instructors and classroom material. Rather, while some instructors and
campuses wash their hands of the responsibility of teaching the ethical facets of
plagiarism by quoting university policies, others choose instead to enforce panopticonlike techniques such as plagiarism detection software to catch students in the act of
plagiarizing. Overwhelmingly, these classroom practices inhibit students from engaging
in the discourse of academic writing by not fully informing them of the issue and failing
to provide a space where it can be fettered out, but they also create a subjugated power
structure where students are taught to be fearful of academic writing through constant
surveillance. If the instructors in my research are an indication, CSUS composition
instructors, however, seem to be working in many ways toward treating plagiarism and
citation in a more fulsome manner. However, in terms of preparing course syllabi and in
the variety of activities that instructors use, CSUS faculty can improve in making
authorship, attribution, and academic honesty more centralized to first-year composition
classrooms. In the next chapter, I will provide practical applications for employing
pedagogies in first-year writing courses that aim to portray academic honesty, authorship
and attribution as complex issues that are dependent upon a given discourse community’s
conventions and ethics.
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Chapter 4
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Pedagogic communication is often viewed as a carrier, a relay for ideological messages
and for external power relations, or, in contrast, as an apparently neutral carrier or relay
of skills of various kinds. -- Basil Bernstein
Introduction
Thus far, I have demonstrated that many students in the university are at risk of
failing, or do fail to enter academic discourse communities, by two major avenues. The
first is that students are forced to leave the university because of grades, personal choice,
or other circumstances; the second occurs when, as Lisa Delpit discusses, some students
fail to make the discourse and conventions of their chosen academic community an
automatic function of students’ writing.24 In order to mediate between first-year
composition students and academic discourse communities, I have argued that by making
plagiarism policies transparent, and by making issues of authorship central to classroom
discussions and writing, first-year composition instructors can assist students who are
new to the academy to make the transition from outsiders of their academic discourse
communities to insiders who understand the language and conventions of the discourse.
There are many ways that instructors can incorporate a more contextualized and
thorough approach to authorship and plagiarism in first-year composition classrooms.
Amy Rubillard, an Assistant Professor at Illinois State University, has created an entire
semester’s worth of reading and writing that focuses on “the cultural politics of writing”
24
See Chapter 2 for a full discussion.
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(Situating 29). Such a focus keeps students engaged with issues such as: what it means to
be an author, how collaboration challenges traditional notions of authorship, and the
nature of writing across many different discourse communities (29). This classroom
approach allows students to practice authorship, while simultaneously analyzing the
current issues of being an author within the academic community. Students in classes
such as Rubillard’s are also able to practice self-reflection that will enable them to have a
heightened awareness of the consequences (both positive and negative) of their choices in
writing. For example, first-year composition students who are presented with the
conventions, genres, and writing styles of academic discourse, and are also asked to
analyze these components in terms of their effect on students’ identities and membership
in academic discourse, will be better equipped to make assertive decisions in their
writing. These students will also be better able to exercise agency in their writing, instead
of failing to appropriate the language of the university.
The purpose of this chapter is to present a rubric that can be utilized in first-year
composition classrooms to assist instructors in creating a classroom approach that
presents academic honesty and issues of authorship in a more contextualized and in-depth
manner. First-year composition instructors can apply this rubric to their current classroom
materials (readings, formal writing assignments, and informal in-class and out-of-class
assignments) to ensure that their classrooms are moving students toward a better
understanding of academic writing and (more importantly) and a better understanding of
how issues of authorship and plagiarism influence student writing. This rubric is geared
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not as a tool for assisting first-year composition faculty in responding to student writing,
but as a way of evaluating the classroom environment and written work of instructors. It
breaks classrooms down into three levels. Classrooms that meet most of the
characteristics under category three are classrooms that are employing a variety of
techniques that assist students in understanding the importance of citation and academic
honesty, and are presenting these issues in complex ways. Classrooms that fall under
level two or one present these issues in decreasing amounts of complexity, and may not
be utilizing a variety of activities and techniques to help students develop their skills.
Thus, an instructor can use the rubric as way of assessing how they are teaching students
about academic honesty and plagiarism, and which areas of their classes instructors can
improve. This rubric also assists first-year composition instructors in ensuring that their
classrooms are helping students fulfill the WPA outcomes for first-year composition,
including the following specific outcomes:
1. Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power in
[students’] fields;
2. [Understand the] conventions of usage, specialized vocabulary, format, and
documentation in [students’] fields; and,
3. Integrate [students’] own ideas with those of others. (“Outcome Statement”)
In addition to achieving these outcomes, it is hoped that classrooms that integrate the
features set forth in the rubric25 will provide the space students need to learn what it
means to be an author in academia and beyond. This kind of classroom focuses on
25
This is attached as Appendix E.
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allowing students the opportunity to inquire after, and respond to, the kinds of identities
students hold within the university. Students are also able to interrogate the genres of
writing they will be required to complete and what tools and skills students need in order
to become members of the academic discourse community. It is, no doubt, the kind of
environment that first-year composition instructors are already aiming for, but with a
refined focus toward authorship. By approaching the composition classroom from this
framework, students will be better equipped to approach the writing task. This chapter
will explore the various elements of the rubric and suggest practical classroom
applications for each.26
First-year Composition Writing Assignments
The purpose of the rubric in relation to writing assignments is to ensure that the
work first-year composition students are called upon to complete furthers their awareness
of the conventions, genres, and style of academic discourse and that the writing provides
students with a space for self-reflection.
1. First-Year composition writing assignments offer students an opportunity to
view themselves as members of the academic discourse community.
One important criterion from the rubric is that writing assignments in first-year
composition need to offer students an opportunity to view themselves as members of the
academic discourse community. Students need to feel part of the academic discourse
community so that they may begin to see themselves as authors with agency in how their
26
Additional ideas for developing a more complex treatment of these issues are also contained in
Appendix D.
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messages are constructed. This will empower students to be active agents when creating
their writing, instead of reverting to old forms of writing that are tried and true methods
for high school writing but not appropriate at the university.
As James A. Berlin has noted, students need to learn to understand what kinds of
messages can be conveyed (and which are subverted) in different written genres (139).
This awareness, then, becomes a rhetorical choice for students. When students select a
genre, they must understand the implications of writing within that genre. If the genre has
been selected for them, then the students must understand what messages will be
subverted, and which are valorized. By extension, Berlin also argues that sentence level
errors and stylistic errors are just as charged with rhetorical implications, stating that:
most errors in grammar and spelling do not in themselves interfere with
the reader’s understanding. The use of who for whom, for example, seldom
creates any confusion in reference. There errors instead create
interferences of a social and political nature. (139)
One conventional error that Berlin fails to mention, but that is just as important in student
writing, is an error of citation and attribution conventions. As Berlin observes for
grammar, an improperly written citation does not usually interfere with the reader’s
ability to understand the source or the student’s argument by using the source. The error
does, however, create a political interference in terms of the student’s identity, and
implicitly positions the student writer outside the discourse community in which he/she is
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writing.27 An improperly constructed citation argues for the student that the student does
not understand the rules of the discourse community, which reduces the student’s ethos,
thus relegating to the student an identity of inferiority and otherness in relation to the
discourse community.
Given the impact that novice citations can have on student writing, ethos, and
identities, first-year composition instructors need to ensure that all writing (informal and
formal assignments) is working toward helping students become members of academic
discourse communities.
2. Writing assignments should encourage students to engage in a range of datagathering and data-reporting techniques.
Classrooms that encourage students to engage in a variety of data-gathering and
data-reporting techniques further assist students in entering academic discourse
communities by allowing them to act as fellow-researchers in the university. Since
academic discourse communities all require different forms of collection and analysis of
data, it is worthwhile for first-year composition instructors to give students an
opportunity to experiment with these techniques early in their academic careers. In
addition, this will help students to begin to see the value of different forms of evidence
and data, and the practice needed for students to be able to use these strategies later in
their careers. This pursuit would also reinforce the goals of a rhetorically-oriented firstyear composition classroom. For example, if students are encouraged to collect data from
27
See Chapter 3’s discussion of Berlin for a more in-depth discussion.
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a variety of sources, they could then analyze how various sources present research
findings, and how such sources utilize rhetorical devices in presenting data. As a result of
this exercise, students will become more rhetorically sophisticated consumers of data and
information.
One textbook that encourages this in student writing is Stuart Greene and April
Lidinsky’s textbook From Inquiry to Academic Writing. At the conclusion of this
textbook, Greene and Lidinsky offer multiple theme-based writing sequences, all of
which encourage students to move from utilizing a singular text as evidence in the
beginning of the sequence to adding scholarly research, and eventually, original research
(878-879). This sequence allows students to see a singular issue develop and blossom as
multiple modes of data gathering and data analysis are added. The first assignment
focuses on students responding to an issue based on their own interpretations and
experiences, and moves the student toward increasingly more academic and discourse
community-oriented analyses. While instructors do not necessarily need to follow this
theme-based sequence, Greene and Lidinsky demonstrate the advantages of helping
students gain confidence in utilizing multiple forms of data-gathering and data-analysis
techniques in their writing.
3. Writing assignments will be scaffolded and prepare students to utilize sources
in their writing.
One way of making first-year composition classrooms more student-centered is
by assisting students throughout the drafting process in utilizing outside sources. This can
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be achieved by requiring students to practice different citation practices, such as
summarizing and paraphrasing, early in the drafting process. In doing so, instructors of
first-year composition will give students increased familiarity with source texts, which
can also be scaffolded so that students are required to reflect on which data-gathering
practices work best for any given writing assignment. Through this process of sourcegathering and self-reflection, students can become more confident when utilizing source
texts in writing and less likely to inadvertently plagiarism sources.
Another activity that can help students prepare to utilize sources is a running
annotated bibliography of classroom readings and outside research. If students get into
the habit of regularly citing sources and developing a strong sense of summary and
paraphrasing, students will further be able to synthesize sources with their own ideas.
This strategy is employed by other instructors within the English Department at CSUS,
and in courses that I have taken.28 It seems realistic that even first-year composition
students can be assigned this kind of project at the beginning of the semester as way of
introducing them to the importance of understanding course readings and citing sources.
This genre of writing may also be useful for instructors who use course portfolios
because it allows them to evaluate students’ progress throughout the semester.
4. Writing assignments must be relevant to students’ academic and personal
lives, and such relevance should be made transparent to students.
28
English 120, offered at CSUS, is the first writing course in which I was required to prepare an
annotated bibliography. This course was taught by Professor Fiona Glade.
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As a first-year composition instructor, I prepare students to receive their first
writing assignment by assigning a short reading by Dr. Daniel Melzer, taken from The
Subject is Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students, edited by Wendy Bishop. Dr.
Melzer’s article offers students practical tips to assist them in decoding and responding to
writing prompts. One tip that Dr. Melzer offers is that students should “think about the
assignment in terms of the class as a whole” (157). My students’ reactions to this tip have
proven quite informative. Often, they admit that they have never considered what the
relationship is between in-class readings and the formal writing assignments. This
response has baffled me and encouraged me. Students who take an interest in assigned
writing assignments may be less tempted to cheat or half-heartedly work their way
through the assignment. When writing assignments are contextualized in terms of
students’ personal lives or with other classroom investigations, students will be
encouraged to thoughtfully prepare and respond in their writing, thus avoiding the pitfalls
of purchasing generic essays from the internet or sloppily citing sources and borrowing
concepts from other authors.
5. Writing assignments must expect students to demonstrate rhetorical
awareness as authors writing for an audience through language and
convention usage.
As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the role that conventions play in
forming student identities, as represented through their writing, is greater than is often
appreciated. While first-year composition often considers conventions a lower order
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concern for students, first-year composition instructors should still be encouraging and
assisting students to consider the ramifications of poor (and proficient) use of
conventions in their writing. In doing so, the onus will be placed back on instructors to be
preparing students to see themselves as writers writing for specific rhetorical situations.
The WPA Outcomes Statement reinforces this orientation toward providing
students with a depth of instruction concerning lower order concerns by stating that:
Learning to write is a complex process, both individual and social, that
takes place over time with continued practice and informed guidance.
Therefore, it is important that teachers, administrators, and a concerned
public do not imagine that these outcomes can be taught in reduced or
simple ways. (“Outcome Statement”)
In order to help students appreciate the role that convention use plays in their writing,
first-year composition instructors can facilitate students’ development of deeper
understandings of all implications of conventions, which will empower them with
heightened agency when writing within the university. This can be achieved by helping
students to understand that the choices they make in all aspects of their writing influences
the identity that they project in their writing.
6. Writing assignments should contain multiple stages of revision for content and
convention.
Process-oriented classrooms and classrooms that focus on writing across the
curriculum often reflect an understanding that the growth and development of the content
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of a student’s writing is a process of evolution and growth. There is a danger, however, of
this attitude not being applied to conventional elements of student writing. Given this
danger, instructors should embrace the drafting process as an opportunity to guide
students through the minefield of textual support and integration of sources into student
writing. This attitude moves plagiarism away from a game of cat-and-mouse toward a
more fulsome attitude that plagiarism and citation reflect students’ understanding of the
careful collaboration that must take place between writers and their sources.
Writing Assignments That Integrate Davis’s Way of Ethics
There are several genres of writing that adapt well to the kind of classroom
curriculum I am proposing. I will discuss a couple of these and highlight the benefits for
students when instructors assign these genres. One particular piece of writing that can
help to develop this awareness in first-year composition students is a rhetorical analysis
of plagiarism policy of the university. Many first-year composition instructors assign a
rhetorical analysis paper at some point in the semester to assist students in developing
analytical reading and writing skills. This assignment can also be done informally by way
of in-class group discussions analyzing the rhetorical elements of the policy as a way of
scaffolding discussions about the importance of citation or the conventions of citation, or
in connection with any formal writing assignment. Students might identify the elements
of the rhetorical situation of the policy (what the tone, message, audience, and voice of
the text are), and which rhetorical appeals the Policy seems to be applying to in its
audience. Students could also consider what the Policy assumes about students and about
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writing at the university. These issues will not only assist students in developing a more
fulsome understanding of how authors’ rhetorical choices influence their writing, they
also give students another point of contact with issues of plagiarism and academic
honesty.
This assignment also meets the WPA Outcomes for first-year composition. The
CSUS English Department describes first-year composition as a course that “concentrates
on prewriting, drafting, and revising processes that address a variety of rhetorical and
academic tasks” (“Course Descriptions”). Rhetorical analyses, then, allow students to
demonstrate their understanding of, and ability to implement, awareness of how the
rhetorical situation, rhetorical appeals, and logical fallacies influence how audiences
receive different texts. Furthermore, the WPA’s positions that students should, by the end
of first-year composition, be able to ”understand how genres shape reading and writing,”
and “respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations” seem to be
objectives that are fulfilled through this assignment (“Outcome Statement”). With the
WPA Outcomes, course goals, and objectives for first-year composition in mind, it is
easy to see how this assignment can be adapted to meet the needs of classrooms focused
on issues of authorship.
Other writing assignments that work well with the rubric are literacy narratives.
One variation on a literacy narrative could have students select a genre of writing that
they already engage with regularly, and investigate the genre, ultimately identifying
characteristics of writing that establish what is considered “good writing” within that
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genre or discourse community. From this general construction, students would need to
interrogate what the genre is, and how other writers create pieces that meet the needs of
the genre. Additionally, students can consider which discourse community utilizes the
specific piece of writing, and what the needs and values of that community are.
These questions will encourage students to fulfill the cognitive abilities that the
rubric aims to develop,29 and also fulfill the WPA outcomes such as understanding “the
interactions among critical thinking, critical reading, and writing” (“Outcome
Statement”). By looking at a text first as a reader and then through critical and analytical
lenses, students may begin to appreciate how writing is created, and how it communicates
messages to its audience. From there, students can begin to fulfill the Department’s
standard that they have practice with the “kinds of challenging critical thinking, reading,
and writing required in academic discourse” (“Course Descriptions”). This assignment
may additionally help students develop a sense of authorship. If the genre selected is truly
something the student is interested in, this activity may help to empower the student to
create his/her own piece of writing within the genre. As students learn how to read and
assess what is valorized as good writing within a specific discourse community, they can
learn to appropriate discourse in ways that will make them, as authors, convincing to their
readers.
Finally, literacy narratives can further help students understand that genres,
conventions and stylistic choices are contextually driven, and can also empower students
29
Criteria 4 and 5 from Appendix B are particularly applicable here.
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to think critically about myriad ways that discourse communities communicate both
intra-communally and with other communities. This kind of reflection and analysis will
prepare students to think critically about the ways they write for other classes and within
their chosen discourse communities.
First-Year Composition Readings
In order to prepare students to write critically in diverse discourse communities,
students must begin the writing process by having material to which they can respond.
Christopher Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki in their research titled Engaged Writers &
Dynamic Disciplines found that the students they observed felt that reading “widely and
deeply…helped them understand not only the subject matter of the discipline, but also the
ways in which it can be/should be presented” (128). Thus, course readings have a dual
benefit in the writing classroom. One benefit is that students have access to material that
will help them understand the issues to which they will respond in student writing. The
second advantage, as Thaiss and Zawacki found, is that giving students professional
writers to read will help them “infer style,” which can be detected and used to students’
advantage (128). Just as the writing assignments can help students understand issues of
authorship and writing for many discourse communities, required readings in first-year
composition can assist students (as the WPA has suggested in their Outcomes) in
utilizing “reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating” (“Outcome
Statement”). The rubric enhances this first-year composition outcome by encouraging
students to think about the role that writing plays within and outside the university, and to
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explore literacies in a way that encourages students to value their many discourse
communities. As an extension to the course rubric, I will present several readings that are
commonly used in first-year composition courses at CSUS that can also be utilized in
authorship-centered classrooms, and that move students toward developing these critical
thinking skills. These readings with also be accompanied with suggestions for beginning
classroom discussions that integrate issues of authorship and academic honesty with the
content of the readings.
1. Readings in first-year composition should require students to employ critical
thinking.
One aspect of teaching practices that instructors must interrogate is what they do
with assigned readings. It seems that regardless of which authors first-year composition
students read, one objective of having them read must be to help students develop critical
thinking skills. As Peter Elbow has said, we
must fight the tradition of treating … readings as monuments in a
museum, pieces under glass. We must try to come at these strong
important texts-no matter how good or hallowed they may be-as much as
possible as fellow writers-as fully eligible members of the conversation:
not treat them as sacred; not worry about "doing justice" to them or getting
them dirty. To be blunt, I must be sure not to "teach" these texts (in the
common sense of that term), but rather to "have them around" to wrestle
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with, to bounce off of, to talk about and talk from, to write about and write
from. (74)
As Elbow so clearly articulates, the purpose of assigned readings in first-year
composition courses shouldn’t be to find perfect examples of prose, admire its beauty and
hope that our students will rise to the occasion to write as some of our history’s greatest
writers. Rather, all texts should be placed under examination in the classroom and
analyzed, poked, stretched, challenged, and discussed to see how one writer writing in
one rhetorical situation answered the call to write. By challenging what these texts offer a
reader, students will be encouraged to think critically and analytically about the diverse
texts found in students’ daily lives. One way that students can demonstrate their critical
thinking on any given reading assignment is to demonstrate participation in the
conversation of the readings. This can be manifested through critical responses that
incorporate elements of the source text (summaries, paraphrases, etc.), which would
require an accompanying citation. This would again provide another point of access to
reify the importance of attribution and citation to all authors (even student authors) within
academic discourse communities.
2. Readings in first-year composition should explore current issues of
authorship.
Mary Louise Pratt’s article “Arts of the Contact Zone” can be regarded as a
seminal article in understanding what occurs when discourse communities come into
contact. As Pratt explains, contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash,
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and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”
(34). Pratt’s essay is not only a great example of the way academic discourse
communities sound, in terms of language, syntax and development, it also encourages
students to challenge established notions of the stability of language and culture. In doing
so, they can extend that argument to question the stability of written genres and
conventions of standard English. Students can begin to demystify writing by challenging
the notion of language stability—questioning beliefs that one form of communication is
monolithic or the absolute correct way to communicate—and begin to embrace how
rhetorical choices influence how and what they say and write.30
Classroom discussions can also focus on how the authors in the discourse
communities Pratt discusses behave within the writing task. For example, Pratt’s
presentation of Guaman Poma, the indigenous Andean, and his letter to the king of Spain
demonstrate interesting moves in authorship and how one person assumed agency over
his writing. Poma’s revision to the story of Adam and Eve to include Amerindians shows
an assertive authorial identity which students can interrogate. For example, they can
discuss why Poma chooses to make these alterations, and what effect the changes might
have on the audience. This can be related back to the kinds of decision students can make
to assert agency in the writing process. Additionally, Poma’s choice in evidence and the
ways in which texts represent collaboration are also good points for students to discuss as
a way of incorporating authorship into the readings. To create a counterpoint to this
Marie Foley’s article “Unteaching the Five Paragraph Essay” seems applicable as one such
reading that seeks to challenge one form of writing that has gained momentous power in school systems.
30
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investigation, students can also compare Poma’s rhetorical choices with Pratt’s by
comparing the voice, tone, appeals, structure, and kinds of evidence Pratt uses with
similar rhetorical elements utilized by Poma.
Part of the rhetorical scheme that students must choose from in academic
discourse communities is how students represent their research and attribute source texts.
Pratt’s article could, in some ways, bridge the connection between professional writers
and the work that the students are drafting in class. For example, as students draft an
essay assignment, a first-year composition instructor could invite all students to come to
class prepared with an example that each student intends to use to support a claim in
his/her paper. As students share these examples, the group can discuss things such as
what tone the example will set, any rhetorical appeals the example seems aimed toward,
and what, in general, the audience of peers thinks about the example. Some examples
may be very academic, while others may be personal anecdotes. The exercise, however,
is useful because it gets students to see how their peers are representing themselves in
their writing through sources. It would also create an atmosphere of collaboration. If one
student’s material seems to be off-topic or irrelevant, the group could then generate ideas
for the struggling writer to use instead. Students could also relate this back to the kinds
of examples that Pratt utilizes and what effect those examples have on her audience (or
on the class as a separate audience).
This approach reinforces the practices the WPA has outlined as the ‘best
practices’ for approaching issues of plagiarism in the classroom which include
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“[designing] assignments that require students to explore a subject in depth” as well as
“giving students time to explore their topics slowly” (“Defining”). Instead of instructors
only informing students that academic discourse communities require citation and,
therefore, that students must cite in order to avoid harsh penalties, incorporating readings
such as Pratt will lay a foundation for students to understand the writing process, as well
as the assignments that students will be called upon to write.
Another method of integrating Pratt’s article into a classroom is to build in-class
exercises or take-home writing in which students practice pre-writing strategies, such as
webbing, as ways of graphically discovering and describing the discourse communities of
which students are members. This can be practiced in-class by teaching students what
webbing is and how it works, and then instructing students to practice the strategy using
the communities described in Pratt’s article. At home, students would then be given a
second practice with the strategy, and yet another contact with the concept of discourse
communities. Both of these practices can be incorporated as scaffolding for literacy
narrative writing assignments and can foreground classroom discussions about Pratt’s
article in general, as well as the importance of collaboration.
3. First-year composition readings will encourage students to think about the
role that writing plays within and outside the university.
Aside from academic texts, a variety of other resources can be brought into the
classroom to enrich discussions and understanding of academic honesty and attribution,
and can further help students explore the role that writing plays outside of the classroom.
109
Since intellectual property and plagiarism have become popular topics in the media,
instructors can also bring in newspaper articles or opinion pieces that respond to issues of
authorship. The BBC, for example, reported in February of 2011 that Germany’s Minister
of Defense has been accused of plagiarizing his PhD dissertation. The article accuses the
Minister of Defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, of copying “word for word, one
passage from a newspaper article and another from a public lecture without attributing
them, while other texts were incorrectly attributed” (“German Minister”). Students that
are introduced to such current events can write about and discuss how accusations of
plagiarism affect an individual’s ethos as a writer (and in this case, as a public figure) in
the eyes of a variety of different audiences. Students can explore how such allegations
might influence the perception of zu Guttenberg from the perspective of his co-workers,
the citizens of Germany, and the international media.
zu Guttenberg’s own case may also be an opportunity to return to the CSUS’s
Academic Honesty Policy and how plagiarism is defined therein. While zu Guttenberg’s
offenses may, to some, seem minor (incorrectly citing some passages, for example),
students could discuss to what extent his actions qualify as plagiarism. This will allow an
instructor to reinforce the notion that, under the University’s policy, plagiarism occurs
whether or not students intentionally commit acts of plagiarism.
The rationale for including current events is to provide students additional
contacts with the ramifications of plagiarism, as well as to understand the larger social
context that accusations of plagiarism can have on students. In other words, by helping
110
students discover that plagiarizing one essay while in school can come back later to
influence their ethos, students might be more receptive to internalizing the importance of
developing good attribution skills. Other such examples from the media are plentiful—
lawsuits involving the authors of the Twilight and Harry Potter book series have also
made headlines in the United States and can serve as indicators of the general
readership’s understanding of the concepts of originality and plagiarism.
An integration of current events into first-year composition classrooms will
further assist instructors in making writing assignments clearly relevant to students’
personal lives. By exploring current events, students will be encouraged to think about
how the principles they are learning in the classroom are applicable in their lives outside
of the university walls. This can be further encouraged through the use of informal
writing assignments such as journal entries or freewrites that ask students to make these
connections on their own.
4. Assigned readings will explore literacies in a way that encourages students to
value their many discourse communities.
First-year composition classrooms can also utilize David Bartholomae’s article
“Inventing the University” in a variety of ways as a means to opening up discussions
about discourse communities. Some students may be aware of the painful process of this
transition, while others may be experiencing the process without the language to name
the experience. In either event, by inviting the students to see the process from the
perspective of an acculturated member of the discourse community, they can reflect on
111
their own experiences in learning to, as Bartholomae states, “try on a variety of voices or
interpretive schemes—to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an
experimental psychologist the next” (624).
Bartholomae’s article is a wonderful exercise for first-year composition students
in reading texts that challenge their ability to critically read texts. My experiences with
this reading in first-year composition classrooms have been that students feel very
frustrated when introduced to the text because of its length and the level of sophistication
in the written structure. Nonetheless, students can be guided to understand the article, and
the experience can be a very fruitful one for both instructor and students.
Through discussion and through informal writing, students can interrogate the
issue of student writing (their writing) from the perspective of an instructor. From there,
students can discuss with one another what Bartholomae suggests instructors may expect
of student writing (in terms of what voices are appropriate, what rhetorical appeals are
appropriate, etc.) and how that clashes or agrees with students’ own anticipated
expectations of their writing. My students have found that what they expected to pass as
an appropriate voice in student writing (that of a reporter regurgitating information, for
example) is not the voice Bartholomae suggests is appropriate. As students come to
understand Bartholomae’s article, they can also analyze the portrait of a student author
Bartholomae gives his reader—that of an “insider” with “the privilege both of being
inside an established and powerful discourse and of being granted the special right to
speak” (631).
112
Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Research
The overall goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the diverse approaches to
making academic honesty and authorship part of a course curriculum. The most
important principle is to bring these issues into the classroom in a variety of different
ways and in different contexts. By utilizing writing assignments, course readings and inclass discussion and activities, the ultimate goal is to create an atmosphere where students
can express questions and concerns about plagiarism and citation, as well as a space
where they can discuss the obligations and options afforded to writers within diverse
discourse communities and experiment with the conventions and ethics of these
communities. As the epigraph to this chapter states, one way of viewing the role of
pedagogical communications is as “a relay for ideological messages” from instructor to
students (Bernstein 25). When instructors make issues of authorship and citation a
prominent part of their pedagogy, it relays the message to students that these principles
are important to their coursework and also part of the ideology of the academic discourse
community that the instructor represents. This message can also be sent to students by
including specific course goals related to source use and developing skills in specific
citation practices (such as MLA format) and by also holding students accountable for
meeting these course goals.
When the relationship between student writing and citation is not made apparent,
it sends the ideological message that these are not practices that are that important to the
discourse community. Or, in other words, while we say (via our plagiarism policies, in
113
our course syllabus and verbal warnings) plagiarism is not tolerated, it does not have any
greater meaning or real significance to the community. This approach is tantamount to
the instructor telling the students “do as I say, not as I do.”
It has been my aim in this study to demonstrate how FYC classrooms, through the
presentation of citation, plagiarism, and academic honesty, are helping students
understand how to become members of academic discourse communities. This research,
however, is not without room for later development; one clear area for further research is
an examination of how instructor feedback on student drafts factors into instructors’ ways
of presenting and teaching students about plagiarism and citation. By exploring this
element of first-year composition, researchers may be better equipped to understand how
first-year composition instructors address issues of authorship, academic honesty, and
plagiarism in all areas of the classroom.
114
APPENDIX A
Research Informed Consent
Consent to Participate in Research
You are being asked to participate in research which will be conducted by Leslie
Anglesey, a graduate student in the English Department at California State University,
Sacramento. The study will study the teaching practices of English 1A instructors
regarding plagiarism in the classroom.
You will be asked to complete a questionnaire about your current teaching practices,
how you present plagiarism in the classroom, your current policies regarding potential
cases of plagiarism, and other attitudes about plagiarism. The questionnaire may take up
to an hour of your time. Volunteers will also be asked if they will be willing to participate
in a one-on-one interview to discuss your responses to the questionnaire, as well as
conduct follow-up questions about your experiences with instances of plagiarism in your
classroom. By completing the questionnaire, you will not be obligated to participate in
any interview.
Some of the items in the questionnaire may seem personal, but you do not have to
answer any question that you don’t want to.
Through your participation in this research, you may gain greater understanding and
insight into your own teaching practices regarding plagiarism. It is hoped that the study
will benefit the English department by considering effective teaching practices regarding
plagiarism.
You are being asked to provide a copy of your English 1A syllabus and other
classroom materials to the researcher as part of your participation in the study. To
preserve the confidentiality of that information, you will be asked to use a black marker
to remove any information that will personally identify you, such as your name, address,
and contact information (office number, email, phone number, etc.).Your responses to the
questionnaires will be confidential. You may return the syllabus to the researcher by
placing a copy of your syllabus and classroom materials in the researcher’s English
department mailbox, or by delivering the syllabus to Calaveras 142. Your decision to
provide classroom materials and/or your course syllabus will in no way affect your
employment status with the University.
You will also be asked to participate in interviews to discuss your responses to the
questionnaire, as well as your experience with instances of plagiarism, as well as your
classroom practices. These interviews will be recorded and will be voluntary. You may
115
complete the questionnaire and decline the interview.
You will not receive any compensation for participating in this study.
If you have any questions about this research, you may contact Leslie Anglesey at (916)
205-0957 or by email at lra32@saclink.csus.edu. You may also contact the faculty
sponsor, Fiona Glade, at fiona.glade@csus.edu or at (916) 278-6355.
Your participation in this research is entirely voluntary. Your signature below
indicates that you have read this page and agree to participate in the research.
__________________________________
Signature of Participant
_______________
Date
I hereby further consent to any audio-recording during the interview process.
__________________________________
Signature of Participant
_______________
Date
116
APPENDIX B
Instructor Questionnaire
Please answer the following questions. Remember, you may decline to answer any
question that you wish.
1. Approximately how often throughout the course of a semester do you
specifically teach students about plagiarism and/or citation in your English 1A
classes? (Please select one which most accurately describes your teaching
practices)
1-2 Times
Per
semester
3-4 times
per
semester
5-6 times
per
semester
7-8 times
per
semester
9-10 per
semester
Other
(please
specify)
2. What methods do you utilize when teaching students about plagiarism (please
select all that apply):
Large in-class
discussions
Small-group in class
discussions
Homework
assignments
Other writing
assignments
Online (SacCT)
discussions
Other (please
specify):
Reading assignments
Classroom Lectures
3. For each strategy you selected in question 2, please attach copies of these
materials to this questionnaire. Be sure to redact any personal information from
these materials, including your name, office number, email address, phone
number, etc.
4. If you answered “large in-class discussions,” “small-group in class
discussions,” “online (SacCT) discussions,” or “classroom lectures” in question 2,
117
please briefly describe the kinds of questions you pose to students.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
5. On a scale of 1-5 (one being ‘not important’ and five being ‘very important’), how
important is it to you that students are presented with instruction regarding plagiarism
in English 1A?
________________________________________________________________
6. Why do you consider instruction on plagiarism important to your classroom (please
select all that apply)?
Preserve
academic
honesty in the
classroom
Avoid
cheating
Prepare students
for future
classes/course
work
Other (Please
specify):
7. What is your definition of ‘plagiarism’?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
118
APPENDIX C
Interview Questions
1. How long have you been teaching English 1A?
2. In your career teaching English 1A, how many instances of student plagiarism have
you encountered?
3. When you suspect a student of plagiarizing an assignment, how do you approach
the student? What procedures do you take?
4. Can you describe in some detail any instances of plagiarism? What kind of
assignment was plagiarized? To what extent was the assignment plagiarized (was it
purchased online, written by a friend, patchwritten, etc.)? What actions were taken?
4. What is the most important consideration an instructor must keep in mind when
approaching a student about a potential instance of plagiarism?
5. Do you utilize any plagiarism-detection programs or software such as turnitin.com?
If so, why do you use these programs? Do you feel that it helps students avoid or
understand plagiarism or academic honesty better?
6. How do you define plagiarism? What kinds of acts should be considered
plagiarism?
7. Do you teach students about the University’s academic honesty policies? If so,
how? If not, why?
8. Is it important to you that you have a plagiarism policy in your course syllabus?
Why?
9. Over your career, has your approach to teaching plagiarism changed? In what
ways?
10. In your opinion, what are students’ attitude toward plagiarism and academic
honesty? How does this influence your teaching practices?
11. If you have taught multiple levels of writing courses (English 1, 20, 109), do you
feel first-year composition students are more likely to plagiarize or less likely? Do
you feel there is any correlation between plagiarism and a student’s status?
119
12. What factors might influence a student to plagiarize an assignment? How does
this influence your pedagogy?
120
APPENDIX D
Ways of Incorporating the Way of Ethics in First-Year Composition
1.
Classroom Discussions
a.
Classroom discussions about plagiarism and citation should focus on
contextualizing citation, and can begin with questions such as:
i.
Why does the academic community value citation?
ii.
How do other discourse communities view citation? Is citation or
attribution required in all discourse communities?
iii.
In what ways does citation affect an author’s ethos?
iv.
What kinds of information needs to be cited? What is common
knowledge?
v.
Brainstorm as a class lists of concepts for the current essay
assignment that are common knowledge and other concepts that need to be cited.
2.
Course Readings
a.
Course readings can be utilized in multiple ways to encourage discussion
of authorship and academic honesty. The following list includes types of readings with a
variety of discussion techniques:
i.
Current newspaper articles about plagiarism. These can develop
discussion on the different ways in which varying discourse communities value citation
that can begin with questions such as: What lead the writer to become subject to scrutiny
for plagiarism? What was plagiarized? What plagiarism acts were committed
(patchwriting, paper theft, poor citation, etc.)? What can students learn from the current
event and/or how can the situation be applied to the academic discourse communities?
ii.
Academic texts already assigned in the course. For first-year
composition courses that already assign articles to read, these can be repurposed with
questions such as the following: How does the author build credibility through citation?
Who is the audience of the text, and how do the citations help or hinder the audience in
understanding the author’s message.
121
iii.
Artwork as course readings. Utilizing art work as texts seems
particularly appropriate for any first-year composition course that has a visual
literacy/visual rhetoric unit. The instructor can display images of original artwork
(Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, for example) and then display parodies, pastiches, or
imitations, and discuss whether the imitation artists have committed plagiarism. This can
also lead into discussions about how citation and plagiarism vary between discourse
communities.
3.
Course Syllabi
a.
The following guidelines can help instructors develop plagiarism policies
in their course syllabi that treat academic honesty in a fulsome manner:
i.
Contextualize the issue of citation and plagiarism in terms of
discourse community expectations and the classroom.
ii.
Briefly discuss why it is important to the writer to consider
avoiding plagiarism, and why it is important to the classroom that the instructor enforce
plagiarism policies.
iii.
Define different acts that constitute plagiarism (paper theft,
patchwriting, and improper citations) instead of simply referring students to the
University Policy.
4.
Other Classroom Activities
a.
Prewriting, Workshop, and Group Activities
i.
Students can be asked for homework to identify passages from
sources that they may want to utilize in their paper. For in-class activities, students can
work through workshop scripts in which they begin to draft paragraphs or sentences that
integrate the quotations using appropriate signal phrases and citations.
ii.
Instructors can prepare prior to class examples of student writing in
which the writers have successful (or unsuccessfully) integrated sources and citations.
Groups can decide if the writers have plagiarized and justify their responses.
iii.
Peer workshops of later-stage drafts can review drafts to
determine: (a) where the writer may need to revise citations, (b) where the responder is
unclear if an idea is the writer’s or a source, and (c) provide the writer with feedback for
122
areas where the draft relies too heavily on sources and where sources would help the
writer make his/her point.
123
APPENDIX E
Guidelines for Reading & Writing Assignments in First-Year Composition
Writing Assignments
Level three writing assignments:
3
Assigned Readings
Level three readings:
 Offer students an opportunity to view themselves
as members of the academic discourse
community;
 Require students to employ critical thinking
through follow-up activities such as writing
assignments and classroom discussion;
 Encourage students to engage in range of datagathering and data-reporting techniques
(summarizing course readings, interviewing
experts, drawing on personal knowledge,
examining non-academic texts, etc.);
 Explore current issues of authorship;
 Contain scaffolding that prepares students to
utilize sources in their writing through various
techniques such as summarizing, paraphrasing
and direct quotations;
 Explore literacies in ways that encourages
students to value their many discourse
communities.
 Encourage students to think about the role
writing plays within and outside the
university; and,
 Contain relevance to students’ academic and
personal lives, and such relevance should be
made transparent to students;
 Expect students to demonstrate rhetorical
awareness as authors writing for an audience
through language and convention use; and,
 Contain multiple stages of revision for content
and convention.
Level two writing assignments:
2
Level two readings:
 May offer students an opportunity to view
themselves as members of the academic
discourse community on an inconsistent or
sporadic basis;
 May encourage students to employ critical
thinking; Readings may be addressed in
the classroom or through writing
assignments in an inconsistent fashion;
 Encourage students to engage in a limited range
of data-gathering and data-reporting techniques;
 May address current issues of authorship
indirectly;
 Provide students with some or minimal
scaffolding that prepare students to utilize
sources in their writing through various
techniques;
 At times encourage students to think about
the role writing plays either within or
outside the university on a limited basis;
and,
 Attempt to demonstrate relevance to students’
academic and personal lives, but such relevance
may not be transparent to students; and,
 Provide minimal exploration of literacies in
or do not encourage students to value their
many discourse communities.
 May at times expect students to demonstrate
rhetorical awareness as authors writing for an
audience through language and convention use;
124
and,
 Contain some stages of revision for content, but
revision stages for conventions may be omitted.
Level one writing assignments:
1
Level one readings:
 Fail to address students’ membership in the
academic discourse community;
 Do not expect or require students to
employ critical thinking;
 Utilize minimal data-gathering and data-reporting
techniques;
 Fail to encourage students to explore
current issues of authorship
 Do not employ scaffolding, or multiple stages of
prewriting and revision for either content and
convention;
 Do not encourage students to think about
the role writing plays within and/or outside
the university
 Are not relevant to students’ academic and
personal lives, or fail to make such relevance
transparent to students; and,
 Fail to explore literacies and may devalue
some discourse communities.
 Fail to require students to demonstrate rhetorical
awareness as authors writing for an audience
through language and convention use.
125
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