Plagiarism tweet

Plagiarism tweet Your students are lucky to have such a warm, conscientious, and thoughtful teacher. Sounds like you navigated the situation really well. Stepping back, though, I think you and your students were put in an unreasonable position, which calls for critical examination. (1/11)

Building on peoples’ different reasons for copying, I think it could be helpful to disentangle plagiarism from academic dishonesty and intellectual property theft. (2/11)

Plagiarism is a violation of the norms of a community of practice; it works differently in music, journalism, academia, programming, and cookbooks. (3/11)

A lot of high school students don’t take plagiarism seriously because they don’t see themselves as part of a community of practice. They’re just doing school. (4/11)

Academic dishonesty is a violation of the rules of school. We can’t pretend that “doing school” isn’t real for students. This creates an adversarial relationship between teachers and students, and they often can’t afford to take a critical stance. (5/11)

Still, we can codesign grading systems with students and ensure they don’t create perverse incentives. (6/11)

On intellectual property theft: Our copyright laws are ridiculous. They do not reflect the reality of artistic practice and were not written to serve the public good. (7/11)

We should teach our students how to keep themselves safe (keeping in mind how privilege affects who gets prosecuted and the severity of consequences), but we don’t need to make ourselves moral champions of copyright. (8/11)

Especially true of digital culture. The struggle for open culture (eg fair use, creative commons) and the question of who profits from artistic work could be an interesting topic for a unit on literacy and power. #schmiteracies (9/11)

Pedagogy that separates these concerns could be a fruitful design problem. Ideas: Separate grading and feedback. Cultivate student-produced audiences like lit magazines and journals (love the classroom museum!) where plagiarism will matter to students. (10/11)

Teach citation as a writing skill, not as an integrity issue. While teaching interdisciplinary writing, also teach about discipline-specific issues of credit, appropriation, and power. What else?(11/11)