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Miriam says it just about right, I think: "I'm not convinced 
those job applicants that Rob referred to thought of it as 
plagiarizing.  I'm inclined they were trying to fit in in the 
same way that we ask our students to.  Hence, the same results."

There's a good deal to be reflected on here; it's a way to 
illuminate, I think, just what our _students_ are trying to do. 
Interestingly, in trying to find the case I remembered from a 
couple of years ago, I stumbled on a nice review of a book 
which, among other things, clearly makes the case for the 
parallel between composing a teaching statement (for a portfolio 
or dossier) and producing that term paper.  The review is Jane 
Mathison Fife, "Changing the Contexts for Documenting our 
Teaching," _Pedagogy_ 5:1 (Winter 2005), 157-161, and the book 
is _Composition, Pedagogy, and the Scholarship of Teaching_, ed. 
Deborah Minter and Amy M. Goodburn (Boynton/Cook, 2002).    

I've now read the "information about Plagiarism" that the 
Waterloo letter said you should read "before starting your 
teaching dossier." ( 
http://www.trace.uwaterloo.ca/tacerteach.html ). It's a 
fascinating document. It's directed to participants in the 
Waterloo Certificate in University Teaching, and it's a fairly 
sophisticated version of the sort of advice about ethics and 
plagiarism that universities regularly offer undergraduates. Its 
central focus is integrity and values, and it makes the usual 
move: yes, we all believe in integrity . . . but just in case,  
here are the draconian punishments for violating our rules.      

It also offers references for "how to avoid plagiarism," as 
pretty much all the anti-plagiarism documents I've read do. I 
was reminded that there's something extremely odd going on here. 

A document explaining "how to avoid" something would normally 
outline strategies for avoiding something that might _happen to 
you_. How to avoid being electrocuted, how to avoid being 
mugged, how to avoid eating contaminated food. No one writes 
documents giving strategies for avoiding stealing, or 
infanticide, or lying. If it's a matter of integrity it's not 
something that happens to you, is it?      

Seems to me there are mixed messages here -- just the kind we 
often hear in parent-to-kid discourse. Being bad is something 
you somehow "fall into." You're not "bad," you get corrupted. 
But you'll be punished for falling, anyway.   

I've said this before, so sorry if I'm boring people . . . but 
if I really cared about communicating with you, plagiarism would 
never occur to me. However, if I were in a situation where I had 
to produce discourse you'd approve of, and I had no investment 
in the relationship being mediated by the discourse, I'd do what 
was easiest. And if you said to me, as that letter does, "For 
almost all written submissions to the CUT Program (the exception 
being your research paper), no references are necessary, or even 
desirable.  We are primarily interested in your personal 
reflections on the subject matter of the workshop, panel, 
observation report, etc.," I would know that you are not, in 
fact, actually interested in my personal reflections at all: 
you're interested in whether my personal reflections are the 
kind you approve of.     

I would certainly, on the basis of that rubric, never think of 
explicitly bringing anybody else's ideas in (after all, you're 
interested only in what you can imagine comes out of my soul: 
"no references are . . . even desirable"). So I'd find something 
 that I think you'd be impressed with, and I'd try to make sure -
- if I thought you were checking -- that you couldn't find the 
source. Nothing about this would be about communication: it 
would be about producing an impressive text. To fit in.   

In that case, plagiarism would be a pretty effective tool. Just 
make sure no one saw you using it.

Seems to me the problem, in both cases, is, as Miriam points 
out, the strange rhetorical situation the writer's in. Fife's 
review (and, it appears, even more the book, which I'm about to 
go find) talk about some ways to make the teacher's rhetorical 
situation more reasonable. They apply to what we ask students to 
write, as well.  

(Interesting as well that the Waterloo document is signed by 
Cathy Schryer -- though it says composed by a previous director 
of the service.  I wonder if Cathy can help us understand the 
genre we're working in here?)  

-- Russ

St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/

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