by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  Roots of Consent

It's important to note that, for a variety of reasons, not all universities practice the same regulations around education about and asking for students' consent with respect to the distribution of student work. "Work," in this discussion, could mean anything from an assigned blog posted to a course's Blackboard site, to a comment a student makes in conference or in class discussion, to a research paper written as the culminating project for a course.

Further, "distribution" could mean any kind of re-presentation of students' "work" in a professor's conference paper or publication, to a school database or file where past student papers are kept for future reference, to the use of a past student's essay in a future classroom lesson.

Differences in policing around issues of consent may stem from any number or combination of rationales:

• the communal nature of the school (and its agendas of "sharing" and "community")
• the school's lack of experience with students' resistance to distribution of their work (and thus, lack of a sense of urgency around putting Intellectual Property policies into place)
• a school's historically research-driven ideology (which involves a meticulous checks-and-balances system of consent with human subjects)
• a school's desire to keep up with the policies and expectations that are nationally trendy.

During my time as a graduate student and qualitative researcher at a Research-1 institution, where the stakes around consent from human subjects were very high, I grew to understand clearly and be thankful for the policies of its IRB. My continuing work with the IRB during my research led me not only to realize the importance of the IRB's protection of me and my work, but also to cultivate a vicious, rather lioness-like sense of protectiveness over research participants. I held myself to a standard of representing their work and words as accurately as possible, all the while working within a clearly defined set of research boundaries.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
• print version