Reflection

When I thought about my key term, discovery, six weeks ago, I was interested in the transformation that students go through during their first year of college (and their first year of composition). I considered my own experience in freshman English at Vassar and the discoveries I made there--about academia and about myself. While engaging with different texts, I discovered quite a bit about myself, and I began my major studies in English. Although I have no plans of trying to sway my students to be English majors, I do want to encourage them to use writing as a means of discovery in their lives. Following my key term through the reading assignments this summer, I found myself constantly returning to expressionist rhetoric. My key term could not work in isolation through the readings (and was occassionallly notably absent from them) and led me to other concepts that will be important in my class.

Considering the terms of expressionism, my key term emerges in the context of two others--dialogue and voice. Discovery and self-realization through writing shape the students' voices and prepare them to enter a dialogue with me, with their classmates, and with the existing academic discourse in their fields. In order to enter and participate in Burke's parlor of discourse, then, there must first be a reflective step--a time to pause and to craft a strong voice.

As a result, I plan to emphasize the importance of voice and audience in writing in my ENC 1101 course. After observing my mentor's class this summer, I plan to teach Strand I, which focuses on popular culture, and I am looking forward to seeing the dialogue that emerges both in writing and in the classrooom. Workshops and conferences are particularly useful for establishing a dialogue between all members of the class. I plan to do guided freewrites at least once a week, if not once a class, to encourage this process of discovery and the shaping of voice.

The first paper assignment for the course is a personal literacy narrative. Students will have to reflect and discover how media and popular culture has influenced their character and literacy. I enjoyed reading these narratives in my internship, and I know my students in the fall will use it well. The other two papers incorporate an analytical element in students' relationships to popular culture and again provide a space for self-discovery and creative voice.


Andy Warhol, my first pop culture love

Discovery and Dialogue

My key term, discovery, has not been as present in this week’s reading and discussions about plagiarism as it was in the first three weeks of the term. In fact, it is a notable absence because plagiarism is an avoidance of the act of personal discovery in and through writing.

To prevent plagiarism in first year composition, all five strands have provoking paper assignments. In “The Economics of Authorship,” Kelly Ritter emphasizes the teacher’s role in originality of students’ work. She writes, “We should write original, compelling assignments so that they won’t be recycled; we should be sensitive to student pressures and stress when we assign work” (620). Such assignments push students to reflect on their own experience, develop a personal voice, and, hopefully, discover something about themselves along the way.

When I teach in the fall, I plan to discuss plagiarism, copyright, and fair use doctrine in terms of a dialogue. In first year composition, students are entering a new academic community full of ongoing dialogues—between established writers in the field, their peers, and their teachers. Their paper assignments open up a dialogue between me as a reader and the student as a writer. As in a spoken conversation, I want to hear what they have to say; a recitation of someone else’s words just will not work (and is rather disrespectful to all parties involved).

Margaret Price advises us, “The most constructive way to approach teaching plagiarism is to invite students into a DIALOGUE about the subject, welcoming their perspectives on its complexities” (105-106). Conventions of citation and documentation do evolve, and as Ritter points out, some students plagiarize by mistake because they do not know the conventions. Therefore, I have one line to add to my course policy sheet: Ask questions! Ask yourself questions. Ask me. Ask another teacher. Ask a librarian. Ask a friend.



This dialogue started by:

Price, Margaret. “Beyond ‘Gotcha!’: Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 88-115.

Ritter, Kelly. “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition.” College Composition and Communication 56.4 (2005): 601-31.

Rife, Martine C. “The Fair Use Doctrine: History, Application, and Implications for (New Media) Writing Teachers.” Computers and Composition 24.2 (2007): 154-178.

Hunter, Rik. “Erasing ‘Property Lines’: A Collaborative Notion of Authorship and Textual Ownership on a Fan Wiki.” Computers and Composition 28 (2011): 40-56.