Patchwriting in student writing and what to do about it
Dec 6, 2022 14:47:06 GMT -5
Geo 🇺🇦 🌻, Moni, and 2 more like this
Post by Stephanie (swordlilly) on Dec 6, 2022 14:47:06 GMT -5
Yesterday, an incident occurred in Discord where a server member shared an anonymized sample of student writing, which she correctly identified as plagiarized text. In the ensuing conversation, there was a pattern of condemning the students which I found deeply disturbing and, to be frank, it made me rather angry. So, as requested by the mods, I am taking my thoughts into a forum post, which will hopefully be more conducive to discussion due to its slow-moving nature.
Research on patchwriting is still ongoing, and as I realized from yesterday's incident, hasn't quite made its way into all academic circles yet. I first heard about it during a pedagogy workshop that I attended seven years ago. (In total, I have about seven years of experience as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. My duties included leading discussion sessions, grading student papers, and answering student queries. I also participated in pedagogy workshops, which were all paid for by my university. I was very lucky to be part of a union that advocated for these job-training benefits.) Student plagiarism is a topic that has come up in my professional life and I am both passionate about it and qualified to speak about it.
Patchwriting:
Recognizing that this phenomenon can exist in student writing, the question then is what to do about it. Here is Howard's sharing of her personal experience when she first observed patchwriting in her class:
Gerald Nelms suggests this method of helping students to develop an academic voice of their own:
(teachingandlearninginhighered.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/nelms-patchwriting.pdf)
Learning how to write academically is a process that takes lots of practice, and it is wrong to criminalize students for not having fully developed that skillset yet.
Research on patchwriting is still ongoing, and as I realized from yesterday's incident, hasn't quite made its way into all academic circles yet. I first heard about it during a pedagogy workshop that I attended seven years ago. (In total, I have about seven years of experience as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. My duties included leading discussion sessions, grading student papers, and answering student queries. I also participated in pedagogy workshops, which were all paid for by my university. I was very lucky to be part of a union that advocated for these job-training benefits.) Student plagiarism is a topic that has come up in my professional life and I am both passionate about it and qualified to speak about it.
Patchwriting:
- is a failed attempt at paraphrasing
- traditionally constitutes academic misconduct
- "restat[es] a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source"
(Howard, R., and Jamieson, S., "Research Writing." A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. Oxford University Press, 2013: 231-247) - is "a primary means of understanding difficult texts, of expanding one's lexical, stylistic, and conceptual repertoires, of finding and trying out new voices in which to speak. It is a form of imitatio, of mimesis. . . . It belongs not in a category with cheating on exams and purchasing term papers, but in a category with the ancient tradition of learning through apprenticeship and mimicry."
(Rebecca Moore Howard, Standing in the Shadow of Giants. Praeger, 1999: xvii)
Recognizing that this phenomenon can exist in student writing, the question then is what to do about it. Here is Howard's sharing of her personal experience when she first observed patchwriting in her class:
I gave all the plagiarists an "F" on the paper, lectured them on quotation, citation, and plagiarism, and invited them to revise. I now regard that response not only as inappropriate, but as detrimental to the students' learning. The immediate results, for one thing, were unsatisfactory: two of the students still plagiarized, even on the revision. Deeply disturbed by their seemingly irremediable failure to observe basic rules of academic discourse, I searched for answers. . . . Was there something wrong with those students' ethics? With their academic preparation? With their willingness or ability to learn? With the university's admissions procedures? Or was there something wrong with my teaching? . . . Or, I finally came to ask, were there problems with my notion of plagiarism and academic ethics? I now answer this question with a "yes." . . . Those students were learning, not cheating, and there was nothing wrong with their willingness or ability to learn.
Gerald Nelms suggests this method of helping students to develop an academic voice of their own:
Provide students with lots of opportunities to practice synthesizing, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and citing sources in a safe environment where their writing is assessed formatively, so that they are not punished for patchwriting
In my workshop, we talked about concrete strategies such as doing in-class paraphrasing exercises, modeling notetaking, showing examples of good citation, and assigning homework where the sources were selected beforehand. I have also led group discussions with the goal of helping students to understand both why we cite sources and how to do it.
Learning how to write academically is a process that takes lots of practice, and it is wrong to criminalize students for not having fully developed that skillset yet.
