I feel that I've failed a bit in teaching citation this semester. Some of my students have gotten into the habit of citing, at least, so I don't think I've failed there, at least. (And to be honest, if I could get every student to get in the habit of citing in academic contexts, I'd feel pretty good.)
The failure's a bit deeper than that, and comes from my sense of some of the research papers I've been reading this week. The students know they need to cite. But on some level, they don't know why they need to cite. Or, perhaps more to the point, they don't know why they're incorporating someone else's argument so that they need to cite it.
As we discussed a few months ago, we cite people's work for many different reasons. But some of my students don't seem to really understand any of those reasons. So they include something about someone else's work in the paper, and cite it appropriately, but it really doesn't contribute to their argument. It's just there. Maybe they think having it there will lend "credibility" to their own argument, but since it's not contributing, it doesn't work that way, even.
Back to grading jail.
I've been thinking about this a lot this term, having taught a first year seminar on matters of plagiarism and authorship. The students did learn a lot about establishing authority via developed expertise, and about different reasons for citing; they did learn a lot about inquiry and recursive research. But so many of them still clung to habits developed earlier about reading-to-find-a-quote-to-support-the-point-I-already-know-I-want-to-make. I think the shift to reading deeply, and sometimes reading to synthesize and report what others have done/concluded, and the shift to posing a question and then forming an answer, is a huge one.
ReplyDeleteI'm also seeing roots of this in my daughter's middle school experience. In general, I have been impressed by the ways our district teaches writing. Lots of attention to process, to audience, to genre variation, to sharing and reading work. But in 6th grade they are suddenly being asked to research--largely via google--with little to no instruction in research or source evaluation, with no guidance about citing sources much, with no guidance about copyright or plagiarism. I presume this will come later...but it's creating research habits that are actually Not Good. So I've developed a bit more compassion, or something, for the struggles of my first-year students, even as I sometimes felt frustrated that they just couldn't get citation closer to right.
You've hit the nail on the head: they don't know why. I had this problem even in my upper-level literature class this semester. I keep talking about the need to enter into the scholarly conversation, but they don't get it, maybe because most of their conversations involve disconnected messages of no more than 140 characters. I don't know how to fix this but something has to change because the result is some really dreadful reading this time of year.
ReplyDeleteI'm relying more and more on Joseph Harris' book _Rewriting_ to help me deal with this issue. It really gets at the "why" of the issue of sources in a way that most other textbooks don't--that it's about engaging in conversations with your sources, building on or countering their arguments, or borrowing conceptual frameworks in order to advance a common intellectual goal.
ReplyDeleteSo interesting the connection between this and an IRL conversation this a.m.: So they include something about someone else's work in the paper, and cite it appropriately, but it really doesn't contribute to their argument. It's just there. Maybe they think having it there will lend "credibility" to their own argument, but since it's not contributing, it doesn't work that way, even.
ReplyDeleteI am colleagues with a returning student who is struggling with citing to all the correct things and for all the right reasons. She got criticized for citing to a source that did not support her content/ideas/thesis in a paper and got a 79 for the first time ever. She just doesn't get academic writing and all the reasons for citing. I tried (using your previous blog) to talk about the different reasons for citations. She is terrified she is going to get "caught" by turnitin or some other program when she has truly tried to cite appropriately.
ChrisinNY