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12 P o s t P e dAg o g i cA l r e f l e c t i o n s o n P l Ag i A r i s M A n d cA P i tA l Rebecca Moore Howard I think [Pierre Bourdieu] was very much a propounder of a new Enlightenment. He was committed to reason, to science, to the role they should play in contemporary societies. Loic Wacquant I believe in pedagogy. I have devoted a career to curriculum and pedagogy , and I continue in that work today. Because my scholarly research focuses on authorship and specifically on plagiarism, especially student plagiarism, it might seem that my work, if successful, would lead toward better pedagogy, which would in turn lead to a diminished incidence of plagiarism. That is indeed my objective. I pursue that objective in my teaching, my scholarship, and my textbook writing. And I meet with enough success to encourage me to continue. Yet the more I study student plagiarism, the more I identify problems not susceptible to pedagogical solution. Increasingly, I find myself confronting the limits of pedagogy. Pedagogy can’t persuade students to value the forms of capital that pedagogy offers and thus to value the ideals on which pedagogy is built. As a result, pedagogy must inevitably fail in its attempts to impart “moral” principles of composing one’s own texts instead of appropriating others’—which Kelly Ritter (2005) has called “whole-text” plagiarism. We labor in error when we believe pedagogy can impart foundational textual morals—or basic skills in source citation—and thereby put an end to what we are pleased to call the “plagiarism epidemic.” Back in 1926, textbook writer H. Robinson Shipherd described the avoidance of plagiarism as a matter of honor, decency, and justice (92). That strand of thinking has prevailed in contemporary thinking on the topic, as evidenced in honor codes and policies against academic 220 BeyON D P OST P ROCeSS dishonesty. Dennis Baron speculates on the possibility of a “low moral threshold” in plagiarists (1994, 90). Christine Tanner takes that line of thought further, worrying that dishonesty may have become “so pervasive in our culture that cheating and plagiarism are becoming acceptable practice, necessities for survival in this fast-paced, demanding society ,” a phenomenon that would amount to “the unraveling of the moral fabric of our society” (2004, 292). This logic has a time-honored pedigree , anchored as it is in John Locke’s political philosophy. The development of copyright in England was based on Locke’s assertion of creators ’ moral rights to ‘own’ the fruits of their labor, and that has affected our culture’s way of thinking about plagiarism, as well (Butler 2006, 21). And the pedagogical responsibility for moral education is grounded in the work of John Dewey. McCabe and Pavela believe institutions can and should institute “clear and consistent definitions of academic dishonesty” (2000, 36), and I agree. I agree, too, that college instructors should teach students how to handle and cite sources. In her teachers’ guide to plagiarism prevention , DeSena devotes a chapter to teaching source integration (2007, 87–91). Margaret Price argues that college plagiarism policies should “indicate to students that learning to avoid plagiarism is a process of learning conventions and customs, not an instantaneous event” (2002, 104). Woodmansee and Jaszi take up a similar argument: What is needed, in short, is an ethos of collaboration which would encourage students to acknowledge their debts, and a corresponding rhetoric of attribution to help them to identify and name these debts—in place of the punitive rhetoric that is typically found in the chapter devoted to the research paper in our current composition textbooks and handbooks. (1995, 784). Whether it is in teaching moral codes or citation rules, an assumption that runs throughout the discourse of plagiarism is that the “solution” to it lies in the classroom. Lynn Taylor articulates this perspective, citing research sources: “Most of the leverage in curbing plagiarism lies in the academic domain: it is what we do in our classrooms to teach and model good practice that has the most impact” (2003, n.p.). I wish to explore a contrary perspective: that the causes of plagiarism exceed pedagogy. Although teaching citation and encouraging morality are worthy endeavors, students’ plagiarisms are not “solved” by these endeavors. Pedagogy can’t fix plagiarism, because students and faculty are too much working from different economic systems. In professorial [3.135.183.89...

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