Price's essay deals a lot with shades of plagiarism and the idea of owning work. She recommends several strategies for covering these nuances with students, but what ideas do you have for helping students recognize that their work is both not entirely personal and deeply personal? In other words, using the five angles for considering "your own work" Price provides, how do we explain to students that plagiarism is contextual, while simultaneously offering a concrete boilerplate policy on the syllabus?
In line with the Selber, what is your personal definition of originality and how will you use it (or not use it) in your classroom? How will you avoid outdated ideas of originality in doing so?
Hi Aram,
ReplyDeleteSelber’s concept of originality seems to tied to the idea that “one of the difficulties of evaluation in the old model is that citation practices act primarily to help teachers separate out what someone else produced (the cited texts) from what the students produce (the original text) in order to set up a hierarchy” (380). For him teachers think of the two types of text as separate and distinct. However, I believe that a student’s “original” text as the combination of the two. A student’s work is not just their own words but how they choose to use, interact with, and present their referenced material. In my own classroom I enact this idea by having lessons around not only how to reference outside source in a proper technical manner but the ways that it can be incorporated into the student’s work. Lessons on the composition advantages and disadvantage of reference methods can take the form of asking students to reference the same material in different ways and then reflect on how those different tactics changes the way their paper is using and reacting to those sources. In order to avoid outdated concepts of originality we must move beyond just citation and actually study how reference is as much a part of original work as the students’ own words are.
Hi Aram,
ReplyDeleteAs the readings pointed out, the dominant notion seems to be that "originality" has most to do with the production or invention of something completely new. I think the important thing to stress to students is that originality can also have to do with arranging something in a new way. Of course, when you are talking about re-arranging someone else's content, you have to be careful to clarify what counts as a meaningful re-arrangement: you can't just swap the order of a few words, for example, and call something yours. But pieces like found poems might be an interesting way to teach that to be original one does not need to haul words up out of the well of his/her soul, as it were; in fact, it is perfectly legitimate to "find" content that already exists and maneuver it into an original form.