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

  Self-Fulfilling Prophesies

While the beliefs above might not seem extreme, I do think they are harmful in the writing classroom and tie closely to plagiarism issues. Although it is perfectly fine for students to have goals and interests other than becoming bestselling authors, I worry that the belief that hard work and education can have only marginal effects on their writing ability will keep them from doing their best work and perhaps discovering more talent than they ever knew they possessed, and/or shirking their writing work and never understanding that they don't have to be bestselling authors to put their always-improving writing skills to good use. In short, I don't want student beliefs about skill and creativity to become self-fulfilling prophesies in the writing classroom, and I think they do for many students, the same students who may use such beliefs to justify downloading essays from the Internet.

Further, most students don't understand that creativity and skill are often conceived in academia as dialogue/engagement with accepted authors and their texts, and then, when and if they do, they may not believe they are qualified to engage the text because they lack the right kind of birthright. As Gerald Graff explains, "…schools and colleges represent the culture of ideas and arguments" (2003, p. 2).

Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they [academics and intellectuals] have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument" (2003, pp. 2-3).

Graff goes on to argue that the very way universities organize the enterprise of learning hides these moves from students. Students can't discern, in other words, that these are the moves that are valued by academics and expected from students because the fragmented nature of general education requirements, for example, obscures disciplinary and interdisciplinary arguments, as well as the nature of disciplinary discourse as essentially argumentative. I find it difficult to think about plagiarism without also thinking about Bakhtin.

Many of the authors in Perspectives on Plagiarism, a particularly inspiring collection for me, also used Bakhtin to frame and think through the issues under discussion here. First, there is his wonderful explanation of the ways our very discursive being is made up of pieces of others. Our internal dialogue is made up of every degree of patchwriting, and every conversation with others consists of the same kind of communication, that which is radically blended with others' words, transformed, stolen, extended. Our internal, external, and textual communication cannot be anything but akin to patchwriting in its various forms. I interpret Howard's patchwriting to be much the same thing as Bakhtin's speech communion. He explains:

Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word 'response' here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account" (1986, p. 91).

Thus, although students don't recognize it as such, they practice creative engagement with all kinds of communication everyday.

• 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