Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
89. unrealism: "a significant obstacle to resolving this dilemma is our desires to avoid complications, to present plagiarism as something fixed and absolute," an impossible goal only further complicated by the fact that "our responsibilities include not only teaching but punishment"--how do we "offer [our] students a safe and well-defined space from which to operate"?
90. step 1: "we need to stop treating plagiarism like a pure moral absolute ('thou shalt not plagiarize') and start explaining it in a way that accounts for these shifting features of context"
91. step 2--that means producing realistic departmental documents on the subject--for many reasons including that new teachers have to use them as signposts for local contextual priorities.

the issues:
(a) common knowledge:
92 "in the neurobiology department of my university is different from common knowledge in the english department. to an extent, common knowledge is different between different groups in the english department, for example, between the composition program and the literature program"--&, really, "facts are also context-dependent"
(b) "your own work"
94. "text ownership by people we now call authors is not a historically constant value"; theory asks, too, "whether authors create texts or...it is the other way around"; even in the same time period, "the meaning of 'your own work' may shift across cultural contexts"
95. another angle of potential instability: "collaborative learning, which i define to include both collaborative writing and peer review....introduces another set of questions about what we mean when we say author or one's own work": "myka" argues "one could say the piece isn't written by two individuals, but by this third persona--the author--created by the process of collaboration" (96); so "how...shall i go about teaching an accurate and usable definition of plagiarism, while also teaching the habits, value, and values of collaborative work?"
96. and yet another: "the web itself can be seen as one vast hypertext, one 'publication' with millions of authors"
97. so to be fair & realistic with students, we need to treat both the ideas of authorship and text ownership "not as an easily defined category but as a site of discussion"--this calls for "not a fundamental change in what...plagiarism policies are getting at but, rather, a change in how their arguments are cast"--we need to emphasize that it's always "context-dependent"
(b) giving credit
98. "it is often unclear how the concept of 'borrowed information; should translate into the specific practice of 'giving credit'"; from many policies, for example, "the novice reader can gather than an academic author might in some way offer credit to sources that don't require formal citation," but will be given no specifics at all for how this should be done

100-1. policies themselves are highly problematic--as documents--in becky's proposed good one "the syntaxt...seems carefully to avoid personal pronouns, either singular or plural...as if the policy were its own author"; perhaps then these "are workplace documents" and "as such...may adhere to the institutional practice of boilerplating"--but if we're going to do this, & then give them to our students, we need to explain the practice we're following; we can't just hand out an authorless document as rationale for why giving credit to authors is always the right thing to do. ("idea-sharing works differently between my colleagues and me when we are wearing our 'teacher-hats' than when we are wearing our 'writer hats'")
102-3. also problematic is the "now that you have recieved this notice, you cannot plead ignorance" stance many policies take--students are still ignorant, just as we are, b/c the notice doesn't & can't provide all the answers (& can't do jack about the persistent, crucial "question of intent")
104-5. what we need to do is (1) "insofar as possible...remove the threatening tone of absolutism that surrounds statements of unintentional plagiarism" & remember "that learning to avoid plagiarism is a process of learning conventions and customs, not an instantaneous event"; & (2) remember/realize/enable-as-practice ways that "students....can and should contribute to evolving definitions of plagiarism"; policies even when they "invite questions" are often "framed as the novice coming to the expert in order to be enlightened, a sort of banking concept of plagiarism"; "instead, invitations to students to question and discuss plagiarism should be approached as part of their participation in a discourse community"
106. b/c there are no answers to a rich site of theoretical complexity, & "the key is acknowledgment of challenges" & working that acknowledgement & engagement with its contradictions into the classroom's ongoing discussions, not just it's read-the-policy-day.

(+ cool suggestions for how to do this that i should practice in 205!)