Responding to Plagiarism Issues

The issue of plagiarism can generate attention as well as discussions almost everywhere, classrooms, meetings, conferences. It might be because the fact that all articles we are reading still argue for the definitions of this term. The definition itself is somewhat ambiguous because it has been defined from different perspectives, personal, institutional, and international. This could be confusing to teachers and students to exercise this concept outside the Western academe as well.

The recurring issue mentioned in almost all readings is how to equip students to be aware of this issue so that they will not commit this “academic crime”, especially for students who are outside the Western academic institutions. In this response, I would like to propose two alternative pedagogical-related approaches to this issue: literacy narrative and consciousness of textual borrowing.

In the first approach of asking students to write literacy narrative, this approach is valuable for students to recognize themselves, their cultures, the way they live and learn, how they gain literacies. Apart from that we can also ask students to write the significance of their literacies and how they can use their literacies to help others who are in need. With this assignment, students have to start their writing from their own personal stories in which they cannot copy from anywhere. We teachers can help students to incorporate other texts to support their experiences by providing other people’s narratives. We could ask students to bring in some (famous) biographies that they are interested in or they share some similarities (or differences). Students will start acknowledging other stories into their own to support their arguments. This assignment helps students to avoid the issue of patch writing and plagiarism.

Another approach is to raise students’ awareness of plagiarism issue in writing for academic purposes. We can teach students general guidelines of citation and textual borrowing. We can teach students to paraphrase ideas by pairing students up in class to practice this exercise. This will help students to (somewhat) trust students in asking for peer response. For example, if I were to teach writing in Thailand, I would ask students about the issue of intellectual property in Thailand or how Thai scholars exercise their textual borrowing practices. Then I could also show them with local research articles and compare it with Western ones. This will prepare students to be aware of this issue in both local and international perspectives.