Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design. Toward the end of the session, talk turned to the role classroom conversations about plagiarism play in the larger context of teacher-student power dynamics. So often plagiarism reduces the complicated acts of composition and grading into a parent-child chase marked by sneakiness, discovery, and punishment.
Sherrie Levine shoots Walker Evans
Do we do our students a disservice by failing to place plagiarism in the larger spectrum of discourses about linguistic re-use? It seems that to really usher them into “adult conversation” would be to move beyond invokation of rule-based compliance and to acknowledge and explore the larger arena of poetic re-use. The point is not at all to re-brand academic plagiarism as acceptable or as poetry, but rather to open up the dialogue so that students themselves are responsible for naming and analyzing varieties of borrowing and stealing, and become full-fledged participants in the larger contemporary cultural dialogue involving writers and artists such as Kenneth Goldsmith, David Shields, and Sherrie Levine.