I just wanted to stop in quickly to thank Mike for his response to my response–it’s a difficult subject to talk about, so I appreciate your subsequent analysis of both my posting and yours. I think the part of my article that’s the most poorly written (i.e. difficult to read without knowing intentions, which evidences some need for revision when this someday, hopefully, emerges in book form) is about “palatable” ethics. I meant to distance myself from those faculty who believe that students’ ethics are distasteful, but what it ended up sounding like was that I agreed that students should subscribe to more these “palatable” ethics on their own. So that’s a gaff in my own writing, but this is a good venue in which to clear it up.

Nels, your presentation sounds very interesting–I’d love to hear more about what faculty thought of blogs for scholarly discussion. I don’t have a blog of my own, partially because I just never got around to it and partially because I didn’t want the personal kind of blog (i.e. a journal) that many people have. But I’m learning from a couple of colleagues that blogs can be good for faculty-student intellectual exchange, especially as part of a course design. One of those colleagues, Scott Ellis, runs the blog for the journal Pedagogy (where this second article of mine appeared). If you both would like to continue a conversation there about these issues, that would be great and I know Scott would appreciate having your comments. Maybe you could pass the blog info on to your students and colleagues as well. The URL is http://www.pedagogyjournal.blogspot.com/.
Thanks,

Kelly

Did I misread you? I don’t know. It seems to me the implicit opposition you’re setting up between faculty (and the academy) and students, as when you describe students’ “disengagement” and consumerism, and “shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics,” suggests that the values held by students, as a group, are radically different from the values held by faculty — and that the values of students need to change. Is that a fair characterization? That’s where my (again, rhetorically over-the-top) translation of consumerism into avarice came from.

I agree that “students should see composition as a site to grow as authors,” but what I was suggesting with my references to DeVoss, Burton, and Robillard was that many of the things students are doing on their own (i.e., the 75+ remixes of the Star Wars Kid video) are, in fact, radically reshaping our own conceptions of authorship and intellectual property. (I talk a little more about this here.) This is why I mentioned your citation of Bartholomae: while I share much of the social-epistemic approach to composition espoused by Bartholomae, Joseph Harris, Bruce Horner, and others, I also see the heart of Bartholomae’s argument in “Inventing” as deeply conservative, suggesting that the student must always adapt to the academy, rather than allowing that the academy might change to adapt to students’ emerging cultural practices and values. So I hear what you’re saying about getting faculty to examine students’ perspectives, but I wonder if the assignment you offer (it’s interesting, and I’m trying to figure out how I might arrange my syllabus this semester to incorporate it) might risk some students perceiving it as just an opportunity to tell the teacher what she or he wants to hear: plagiarism = bad / look how wicked and underhanded the rhetoric of these sites is. Still, I think it might be fun to ask students to compare the rhetoric of schoolsucks.com with the rhetoric at John Lesko’s famousplagiarists.com — what do you think their reactions would be? (I’d also be curious to hear what you make of two assignments I’ve developed that address issues of authorship, ownership and intellectual property.)

Of course, the thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the classroom practice that is perhaps most useful in moving students’ work away from commodity to be exchanged and more towards a labor theory of value: foregrounding the process by asking students to do lots of generative writing and revise that into a series of drafts. When one places primary importance upon the process, students are far less inclined to engage in the sort of whole-text plagiarism you describe.

But that may be another way in which you and I are talking past one another, since your focus is on that whole-text plagiarism, and my interest in students’ emerging “remix” cultural practices is, in its patchwork-assemblage nature, sort of the opposite. In between the wholly-plagiarized text and the essay Walter Benjamin said he wanted to compose entirely out of quotations is a wide spectrum of acts of textual appropriation and assemblage that I think is much, much more complicated to talk about. Given that circumstance, I’d also — like you — be quite curious to hear others’ perspectives, particularly since there seems to be so much discussion of these issues swirling around right now.

So — thanks again for the response. I certainly didn’t intend to mischaracterize your argument, and I hope you’ll let me know if I did, in fact, unintentionally misread you.

I’m struck by how I feel you are misreading my work (at least this essay, about which you have more concerns than the C’s piece). My intent was to actually highlight how we as writing teachers are largely disconnected from students’ intentions, and to call for instructors to try to bridge that gap. So it seems a bit ironic, at least to me, that you say I’m trying to distance myself from students. And wow–you say that I characterize students as “venal and avaricious.” Do I really come across as that anti-student? These labels about students, stuck to my work, really concern me. I remember when we (you and I) corresponded shortly after the Cs piece and I tried to express these ideas over e-mail at that time. So your reading here surprises me.

I realize that I don’t understand economic theory in the ways that you do–that’s not my expertise–but I am trying to say, in these two articles (that do cover similar ground; one is the more theoretical overview, the second is the pedagogical application), that students should see a subject matter to composition, that they should see composition as a site to grow as authors. I do, in fact, wish that the academy *would* bend to students’ needs more–above you say that I want students to always bend to the academy. Not so. I hope that I was clear that the whole point of these articles is to get faculty to see students’ perspectives and how they often conflict with ours. I guess if I wanted students to bend to the academy, I’d be spending my time on turnitin.com instead of trying to figure out how students feel about authorship.

Also, my composition courses are typically “themed” around the subject of education, so I would probably be the last person to say that composition, for me, has no subject. But I think you have to recognize how the academy constructs the subject–how it hires its teachers, how it shuttles students through its required courses. I cite Bartholomae because I do believe he has some good things to say. I don’t know if he would agree with me, but I am trying to say precisely what you say above: that students are “political, economic, and ethical beings.” When we ignore how and why they utilize the paper mills, we treat them as beings without any of those attributes–completely the opposite of what I’m trying to say. I want teachers to engage in conversations with their students about writing, academic honesty and yes, economic realities. I would love to believe that students are not concerned about the more “practical” attributes of college, but my experience with first-generation college students who are terrified of being unemployed tells me that those concerns are real.

So, rather than blame the student in a blanket fashion for turning to these sites, I’m trying to understand why and how she got there, and what we can do to help make authorship more viable, interesting, and less of a means to a job-centered end (i.e. completing this required course).

So, I’m not sure if my article just isn’t written clearly enough or if you were unintentionally misreading it. And I do respect your reading, and your clearly more intricate knowledge of economic theory–but I think what you detail above really mischaracterizes what I’m trying to say. I hope my response does not seem defensive–though I grant that any response is a reaction of its own. Maybe others can weigh in; I’d like to hear other perspectives.

Kelly