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

  A Stimulus to Creativity

But even if they do make such a connection, some students will not believe they were born with the level of skill and creativity to be able to engage published authors well. I think these beliefs, coupled with the pervasive notion that they cannot use the first person pronoun in any of their writing, give the texts we assign in writing classrooms, as well as the research students obtain on their own, the aura of what Bakhtin calls monologic discourse. Bakhtin explains that such discourse "…is indissolubly fused with its authority-with political power, an institution, a person-and it stands and falls together with that authority" (1981, p. 343).

This means that people don't feel they can enter into any kind of speech communion with that discourse. They can't transform, question, or extend it, for example. So students reading an argument in a text with such an aura would not feel comfortable engaging with it in the expected ways. In addition, so many students have heard over and over again that they can't use "I" in their writing.

I don't think I've gone one semester in my teaching career without a student asking if they can use "I" in their papers since my writing assignments seem to call for their own opinions, and they become confused about how to present an opinion without writing in the first person. Such a belief does not help students conceptualize significant engagement with a text. Such engagement has to come from "I." Sue Carter Simmons explains this issue as set in nineteenth-century colleges:

Other constraints generally left students with little voice or control over the papers they wrote. Composition pedagogy forced students to 'disown' their papers by forbidding first-person pronouns and assigning topics and particular forms. Such practices left students with little ability to use personal experience in their writing and few strategies to mark their texts with their own voices. (1999, p. 42)

She lists these pedagogical practices as encouraging of plagiarism. When students don't believe they can interact with a text in ways that will result in disagreements, extensions, transformations, etc., students are left with mere summary, or the kind of patchwriting that Howard explains is often labeled plagiarism. None of these complex misconceptions can be addressed through the policing tool Turnitin. A policing tool skips over them entirely.

• 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