Reinventing Plagiarism Day

Yesterday, my ENGL 102 students and I finished a two-day plagiarism discussion. Result? I hereby forever ban the Infamous, Boring, Hellfire-and-Brimstone Plagiarism Lecture from my classroom. (Students, rejoice!)

If you’re like me, traditional anti-plagiarism discussions are so familiar that one’s impulse is to put them on autopilot. I don’t know many—if any—teachers who actually enjoy plagiarism day. We tolerate it because we recognize its necessity. Likewise, I’ve never met a student who openly condoned plagiarism; most of my UNC students seem horrified at the very idea. They claim to be eager to learn ways to avoid it, but the minute someone mentions the word “citation,” eyes glaze over all across the classroom.

If, as Trip Gabriel suggested in a recent New York Times article, “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed,” then perhaps the problem is not merely that modern technology muddies the waters of intellectual property, as Gabriel argues. Perhaps we—students and teachers alike—have been quoting our standard institutional rhetoric against plagiarism for so long that we’ve lost some of our sensitivity to what that rhetoric means.

In past semesters, I have been content to repeat the clichéd anti-plagiarism lectures I was given as a student. Like the professors of yore in Gabriel’s article, I “used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.” My lecture could be reduced to three major sections: 1) don’t rob others by “kidnapping” their work; 2) don’t rob yourself by not citing sources that would bolster your credibility; 3) do use citations. By the time I finished demonstrating MLA citation formatting on the board, my students and I were all hugely relieved to move on to something else.

This semester, the majority of my students are transfers, and all of the students have written papers using MLA citation. Instead of re-teaching them what they’ve already learned and practiced for years, I asked them to read the Gabriel article, and we spent an hour discussing theories of plagiarism. To my surprise, the students were quick to dismiss the existence of originality, but equally swift to condemn plagiarism and to insist that they and their peers were quite capable of producing non-plagiarized work. We examined four recent cases of plagiarism that had made national or international news—none of them from undergraduates—in order to explore why avoiding plagiarism might not apply only to college students, and what its ramifications could be in life beyond the classroom.

I’d never seen students so engaged in a plagiarism discussion before, but suddenly, the topic mattered. I had to rearrange my lesson plans, because the discussion was so vibrant that we couldn’t finish it the first day. We decided to handle citation questions on an individual basis. Less than a week after our first class, multiple students have already initiated emails and face-to-face visits with me to discuss citation. They’re asking thoughtful, more detailed questions, and they’re asking not just so they can pass the plagiarism exercise, but because they want to retain this information for the future.

I hadn’t realized before how counterproductive my past plagiarism lectures had been. I’d been presenting plagiarism/citation as an externally imposed limitation, almost a prohibition—if you can’t follow the rules, you can’t be in the club. This time, instead of telling students about plagiarism, I’m asking them about it. I’m presupposing their membership in the club and inviting them to take ownership of its rules.  They’re eagerly rising to the challenge.

One of the questions that earned the most discussion on day 1 involved music: what makes some remixes so good that they can stand on their own artistically, while others are clearly rip-offs and not worth your time? I think that next year, I might begin the discussion with this question, in order to take the concept and stakes of plagiarism even farther beyond the classroom. I can't wait to see what will happen.