Plagiarism

Ah, plagiarism. The bain of every teacher's existence. (Ok, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration.) There are a couple of things in particular that stood out to me from Casanave's chapter on Interaction. First is the idea that our concept of plagiarism is cultural. Certainly this chapter thus builds on contrastive rhetoric in its situating of textual borrowing within cultural practices. This leads to the next point: Are we to entertain those variations or teach students the rigid practices of the American academy? The conflict seems to be one of ideology versus "practical" preparation. This conflict comes up in many issues regarding writing for both L1 and L2 learners. For example, are we to teach academic discourse or not because it enforces hegemonic power relations? Or, does teaching students the language of power give them access to power?

The issue of plagiarism echoes this problem, but teaching American academic anti-plagiarism practices extends beyond issues of power. It can have serious consequences for students who violate these rules. Students can fail an assignment, a course, or even be kicked out of school for egregious plagiarism. To not teach students our (culturally-situated) ideas of plagiarism would be of a great disservice to those students trying to succeed in the academy.

I also want to point out that plagiarism in the age of the Internet is of high interest to me. I had a student who copied and pasted from a movie review into her paper. She claimed that she didn't realize she couldn't take ideas from the Internet. While I didn't really believe her claim of innocence (she took more than "ideas"), she did help me understand that students' often have different percpetions than I do about the Internet. Some might see it as a vast resource for them, something quite separate from the scholarly "research" sources they know they are supposed to cite. And as we encourage students to compose multimodal texts, this concern becomes even more prominent. I have begun familiarizing myself with Fair Use policies even for my own scholarship, and I see the value of having these conversations with students as well. Copying and pasting becomes even looser of a concept as we move from text into photos, videos, and more. An example of this is that my students created Facebook pages for their 101 topics last semester, and they just nabbed images off of a Google search to put on their pages without looking into whether those images were available for Fair Use and without attributing the source of those images. As Casanave points out, "We do not yet know how to conceptualize authorship in an age of electronic multiliteracies" (178).