11 Plagiarism and Radical Trust

Plagiarism

The MTSU Gen Ed English Program encourages a “good faith” model and discourages the use of plagiarism detection services (PDSs), such as TurnItIn. Some scholars are concerned with the ways that TurnItIn benefits financially from student intellectual property without attribution.

The following research and white papers from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) offer further consideration of why you might focus on writing process pedagogy rather than anti-plagiarism policing:

• CCCC’s Position Statement Against the Use of Plagiarism Detection
• CCCC’s Discussion of Turnitin
• Discussion of Turnitin from the CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus
• Further Article from CCCCs: “Plagiarism Detection Services: Unsettled Questions”

These scholars suggest that it’s impossible to win cat and mouse games of trying to catch students cheating and plagiarizing. Such an approach can be frustrating for students and demoralizing for faculty. It’s also useful to be specific about the behaviors that fall under the umbrella of plagiarism, including patch-writing, ineffective citation, over-citation, purchasing papers from others, using AI in-part or whole to develop papers. Each behavior should be addressed differently. To differentiate between these behaviors, consider the MTSU Academic Integrity website, or you may report student behavior for plagiarism, cheating or fabrication.

Most students want to learn, want to do well, and want to have a good experience in your class. We recommend that you design your class such that you meet the needs of students doing their best and trying their hardest. Designing engaging, specific assignments that reflect the detailed learning that happens in your classroom is the best way to assess how students are making sense of the content you deliver. Simultaneously, this is the best way to avoid opportunities for plagiarism and intellectual dishonesty.

Because collaboration and group work is often central to General Education English courses, be careful to avoid contradictions in assessment. For instance, if students are asked to work together on a project but must then turn in vastly different written work, difficulties may arise. Just do your best to be consistent and talk to colleagues and Gen Ed English admin if you’re unsure whether or not your pedagogical goals are mirrored in your course materials and assessments.

Radical Trust

Drawing on bell hooks’ conception of radical love, empathy in the classroom, and museum studies’ conception of radical trust, Kate Pantelides advocates radical trust as a pedagogical orientation. Pantelides’ extensive research on the implications of plagiarism accusations on both student and faculty educational trajectories lead her to this work. She suggests that “the institutional preoccupation with plagiarism and its many trappings (the use of turn-it-in, the draconian plagiarism statements all over our syllabi) break a fundamental trust, necessary for the courage and risk-taking students need to develop as writers and thinkers. We need to not only think about how we address individual plagiarism incidents and accusations, we need to back up and think about how we set the stage in our classrooms.”

It’s not that plagiarism does not occur and that we shouldn’t address it when it happens. Instead, Pantelides suggests that our classrooms and pedagogical materials not be focused on all of the ways that students may make mistakes but rather on how they might be successful. In applying radical trust and considering the opportunity that the beginning of each semester poses, Pantelides suggests “that we comb our documents for mistrust, and we make attendant changes. This means that our teaching materials demonstrate trust, our assessment demonstrates trust, our first day of class activities demonstrate trust.” Of course, depending on your identity and experiences, it may not feel safe to demonstrate trust. As with all pedagogical recommendations, consider what works for you, what best serves your students, and what pedagogical goals you might adopt going forward.

Pantelides writes, “Radical Trust is (as we’re able) an effort to start fresh in the classroom, but not an invitation for naivety, nor a dismissal of the very real problems – physical, material, psychic, and emotional – perpetuated on and by faculty and students. It is radical precisely because it disrupts logical, rational responses to academia. It’s simply an access point for learning in our classrooms, kairotic openings afforded by the semester-quarter system.”