Mixing or Plagiarizing?

I doubt anyone was thinking about plagiarism when the CCCC 2010 theme, “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew,” was chosen, but given recent events in Germany literary world, plagiarism clearly fits the focus.

News articles last week announced that German teen author Helene Hegemann of the highly-acclaimed debut novel Axolotl Roadkill not only lifted passages from another novel, copying as much as an entire page with only minor changes, but she also denied that such copying was plagiarism. Her explanation, described in the New York Times’ article “Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism,” is simple and straightforward:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Mixing, for Hegemann, is borrowing from others and reshaping or fitting the borrowed text to create some new document. In music, mixing might involve borrowing a musical riff and then incorporating it in a new piece as a recurring theme or starting point for further variations. In literature, mixing might be taking a passage or scenario and rethinking it as part of some new text.

A blog entry on Hit & Run: Reason Magazine provides more details on Hegemann’s motives:

In comments to Buchmarkt, Hegemann cops to “ruthlessly robbing my friends, filmmakers, other writers, and myself,” but only in the context of a collaborative-creation model (leaving out the vexatious details about who gets paid when the collaboration is done).¹

While it feels new to many of us, this kind of artistic theft has been around for centuries. Chaucer was remixing The Decameron in his Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare borrowed from any number of Italian renaissance texts. There’s more to mixing then just copying and pasting though. To be effective, the new use should go beyond the original, perhaps commenting on it or rethinking the original piece. T.S. Eliot, surely the Grand Mix Master of Modernism, wrote:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. (“Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood: : Essays on Poetry and Criticism)

Does Hegemann’s mixing pass the test? Is she simply stealing, or is she rethinking and revising the text she borrows in a way that makes it better or different? Critics are split on the issue.

The Guardian suggests that Hegemann simply does not understand what she has done—“To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she's done is no more than ‘mixing.’” Student journalists label Hegemann’s copying as blatant plagiarism in the Indiana Daily Student and the Baylor Lariat Online. The comments on the New York Times’ Learning Network blog entry “What Are the Attitudes Toward ‘Cheating’ and Plagiarism Among Your Peers?” extend the discussion.

The situation is ripe for class discussion, but ultimately there are few conclusions. Is it mixing or plagiarism? I can’t be sure. I don’t read German, and I don’t have the two books. As a teacher, I know that simply adding a bibliographic citation doesn’t make it okay to insert a full page from another text into your own draft. But what would make such borrowing okay?

I keep returning to Eliot’s explanation. Borrowing may be okay if one works as Eliot’s good, mature poet. If a writer revises a text in a way that creates “something better, or at least something different,” perhaps it truly is mixing. Anything else, for me at least, seems like pale imitation at best and, quite possibly, plagiarism at worst.

Mixing or plagiarism? The one thing we can be sure of is that there many questions to consider, at CCCC in Louisville and beyond.

 

For more information on discussing plagiarism in the classroom, see “What’s the Best Plagiarism Detector?” and “Why I Don’t Worry about Plagiarism.”

 

---

¹ I do not read German, so I’m quoting from various blogs and news articles online that have translated Hegemann’s comments, rather than taking passages from the original.

Finding a Way into the Networked English Classroom

I was out of the English classroom during the 2007 and 2008 school years, a time during which I perceived a digital revolution in reading and writing in and out of school settings. Barraged by blogs, wikis, social networking, Twitter, Ning (and a variety of other oddly-named Web 2.0 platforms and programs), it seemed to me that the world of the book and the notebook (or is it Kindle and iPad?) had become suddenly passé.

The truth is, of course, that there was nothing at all sudden about this digital revolution. Rather, it had been in full swing well before 2007, but I had not begun to find my professional entry point to the ongoing exploration of the potentials and pitfalls of the new communication age.

Discovering such an entry point—an intersection of that with which you’re already familiar and that which you and students need to know more about—is a valuable professional gift to give yourself and your students. In this week’s blog, I’ll share a partially realized version of one of my entry points (along with what I’ll do better next time) and offer with some resources that might facilitate the development of your own entry point.

At the end of last semester, a business/careers teacher asked our school librarian and me to facilitate a session for his students on verifying the credibility and usefulness of a web resource for a research project. Awash in ideas on how to best use a single fifty-minute session to launch into such a huge topic, we decided to play on our strengths as savvy navigators of search engines and the content they deliver us by adapting ideas from the ReadWriteThink.org resource “Hoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation.” As part of the lesson, we conducted carefully constructed think-alouds on how we’d use a search engine and evaluate sources using a variety of strategies.

As their ticket out the door, we asked students to tell us one thing they learned about using search engines to find content and how to evaluate a source once they find it. Their responses, unsurprisingly, revealed enormous gaps between Internet-savvy students who surf thoughtfully and intentionally…and those who seem not to understand that Google itself is not a content source.

(Case in point: As we tried to demonstrate the importance of cross-referencing sources, one particular student logged into Wikipedia and changed the entry we were about to project to contain significantly erroneous information. Much of the rest of the class was baffled, and our well-rehearsed think-aloud took a spontaneous diversion into a real-life example of the fallibility of Web-based research.)

When I deliver similar instruction with more time and to my own students, I’ll definitely keep the think-aloud component to model my processes for searching and evaluating, but I’ll also add a follow-up activity that I’m borrowing from some middle school colleagues. While students are engaged in the first steps of independent inquiry, I’ll meet with each of them for just a few minutes as they search and evaluate a site. Prompting them to engage in a scaled-down version of a think-aloud with five or so targeted questions, I’ll be able to uncover what the entire class still needs to know, what some individual students still need to know, and what I still need to learn about effective information navigation.

I’ll be the first to admit that my entry point into instruction in our network world is a relatively simple one. Or at least it seemed that way until I discovered how much I take for granted about the background knowledge and thought processes behind a basic Google search. You may already know the right entry point for your own students, or you may not know where to start. Either way, here are some NCTE resources that can get you going:

• Check out Sarah Kajder’s fantastic new book, Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students. You’ll see cases of real teachers finding their way in the networked classroom and a framework and resources to get started (or further along) yourself.
• Enroll in Bill Kist’s web seminar The Socially Networked English Classroom: Web 2.0 in the English Classroom if you’re ready to move beyond Google to blogs, wikis, and social networks.
• From ReadWriteThink.org’s new professional development section, in the Reading Online strategy guide you’ll learn how online reading differs from offline reading and strategies to build and reinforce the skills that online reading requires.
• Looking for a sustained examination of what 21st century curriculum and assessment looks like? Interested in tapping the rich resources and collaborations made available in a 21st century learning community? Consider enrolling in Pathways for 21st Century Literacies.
• Don’t feel you have to do any of this alone! Check out the conversations in the NCTE Ning where you can learn about social networks while participating in one!

African American Authors Online

It’s time for readers everywhere to collect texts for African American Read-Ins and Black History Month celebrations. You probably have some great resources in your library, but the Internet expands your options even further. Not only can you find audio and video recordings of authors reading their works, but you'll find rare texts that are not available anywhere else—like oral histories, personal letters, and even sheet music.

For this week’s blog, I’ve gathered a collection of links to resources that range from 18th century poetry to a blog entry written this week. Click away, read, and marvel at these rich resources. There's enough that you can visit a new site every day this month!

General Background Information

1. African American History Month, from The Library of Congress
2. Black History Month, from Biography.com
3. Black History Month, from EDSITEment
4. Black History, from The History Channel
5. Culture and Change: Black History in America, from Scholastic (includes a video interview with Christopher Paul Curtis)

Literature

1. A Brief Chronology of African American Literature, from San Antonio College Lit Web
2. African American Poets, from Famous Poets and Poems
3. African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, from The Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
4. African-American Women, from Duke University Library
5. Black History, from Academy of American Poets
6. Twenty-Eight Days Later, A Black History Month Celebration of Children's Literature, from The Brown Bookshelf (Check the archive links on the right for celebrations from 2008 & 2009 as well as a poster you can download and print)
7. Video Interviews with children's book authors and illustrators, from Reading Rockets (includes an interview with recent Caldecott Medal winner Jerry Pickney)

Historical and Nonfiction Texts

1. African-American Quotations, from InfoPlease
2. African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, from the Library of Congress
3. African American Cultural Heritage Tour, from the Smithsonian Institute
4. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, from American Studies Hypertexts at the University of Virginia
5. The Church in the Southern Black Community, from Documenting the American South
6. Electronic Text Center: African American, from the University of Virginia (Note this site includes texts about African Americans as well as by African Americans, so you will need to help students choose wisely to avoid mistakes.)
7. In Those Days: African-American Life Near the Savannah River, from the National Park Service
8. North American Slave Narratives, from Documenting the American South
9. Notable Speeches and Letters by African Americans, from InfoPlease

Personal Histories

1. Experience War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, from the Library of Congress
   • Buffalo Soldiers: The 92nd in Italy
   • African Americans at War: Fighting Two Battles
2. Oral Histories, from the National Visionary Leadership Project, including histories from Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, and Faith Ringgold
3. StoryCorps Griot, from National Museum of African American History and Culture

Blogs and More

1. Sharon Draper's Blog Read details on the author’s trip to Africa, and comments on her books Just Another Hero and Sassy.
2. Nikki Grimes Fan Page Check the Wall for responses from the author to comments posted by her fans.
3. Alice Walker’s Blog Find new poems, fiction in progress, and a tribute to Walker’s friend, historian Howard Zinn, who passed away last week.

Coveting Books

When I learn of book awards like NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award and ALA’s Newbery and Caldecott Medals, immediately my list of books-to-read grows—as if that pile by my bed could get bigger without toppling over and burying me. I begin to anticipate opportunities with these books... maybe I could read this with my granddaughter or maybe I could use this book or part of it with my college freshmen. Maybe this is a book to recommend to one of my two book groups or maybe I could have one of those luscious Sunday afternoon reads of a book just for my pleasure much as Matthew Bucher describes in "The Book Club with Just One Member" (The New York Times,January 23, 2010).

A friend once told me that his younger brother would panic when he didn’t have a song in his head. I feel that way about books. I need to have book words playing around my brain both to anchor and challenge me. I can’t imagine how dreadful it would be not to feel that way, but unfortunately, many of our students have no such kinship with books.

Katie McKnight’s 2008 Annual Convention Session posting and subsequent discussion on the NCTE Ning, “Pedagogical Practices For Teaching The Classics To Struggling Readers,” features several tips and more booklists to help us help struggling readers. And Kylene Beers’ book When Kids Can't Read--What Teachers Can Do: A Guide for Teachers 6-12 provides a handbook of ideas for reaching those kids without “book words” in their heads. You might want to take the survey Kylene and Robert Probst have just put out for teachers of students grades 4-12 regarding novels for struggling readers. Note that the survey ends January 30.

Two of my favorite online resources about books for young people and teachers of books are Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn’s A Year of Reading and Teri Lesesne’s The Goddess of YA website.

And, if you’re thinking you’d never use those Orbis Pictus winners in your classroom, think again with the NCTE books The Power of Picture Books: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School and The Best in Children's Nonfiction: Reading, Writing, & Teaching Orbis Pictus Award Books.

Metaphor Makeovers: The Secret to Test Success

When students sit down to take a test, how do they think about themselves? It may seem like a silly question, but the answer probably matters more than you think.

Attitude Matters
“The Truth about Grit,” published last fall in The Boston Globe explains the significance of the way we think about ourselves and our effort. It turns out the way you see yourself can be the difference that makes one person succeed where an equally intelligent person fails. If you think of yourself as someone who is smart, you may do reasonably well. However, if you think of yourself as someone who works hard and tries to improve, you’re more likely to succeed according to the studies described in the Globe article. You have what researchers call grit.

It’s not just stubbornly sticking with something though. There’s more to it. People with grit believe that they have to work hard to succeed. They have an organic notion of how success is achieved. They believe it takes ongoing effort, with constant attention to thinking, changing, and evolving your abilities. As the article explains,

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort. Carol S. Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, refers to this as a “growth mindset.” She compares this view with the “fixed mindset,” the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with. “A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,” says Dweck.

If you’re not yet sold, Dweck’s research may convince you. Dweck took a group of fifth graders and gave them various IQ tests. After the first test, half of the fifth graders were told that they must be very smart while the other half were told that they worked very hard. The fifth graders who were praised for hard work (for their grit) did better on subsequent IQ tests than students praised for being intelligent.

Testing Metaphors
Now consider how we currently talk about achievement tests and education. In her book Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards, Rebecca Bowers Sipe describes the two predominant metaphors used to talk about education: an industrial, assembly line metaphor, and an agarian, organic metaphor.

Using the assembly line metaphor, education focuses on “breaking complicated literacy tasks down to their smallest parts, teaching and testing the parts, and eventually producing a shiny new high school graduate who would roll out of the school and into college or the workplace fully prepared for the challenges ahead” (p. 16, PDF of Chapter One).

Compare that way of thinking with the agarian metaphor:

The farmer realizes that growing quality crops is a highly recursive process, one that requires careful and reflective practice across a career. Every crop is different. Crops in different fields vary in growth patterns. The strategies that work best with one set of circumstances may be less effective in another. The job of the farmer is to pay attention to the very complex and interconnected set of circumstances in play and to bring the very best professional expertise into practice day-by-day. (p. 16, PDF of Chapter One)

Given what we have learned about the way grit and a growth mindset affect success, it’s obvious which metaphor will better serve students. Standardized notions of education simply don’t work as well. When students take a test, their success may hinge on which educational metaphor is in play. If they have adopted the industrial metaphor, they see education as fixed, with a standard system and uniform parts and measures. The agarian model, on the other hand, is both figuratively and literally about a growth mindset—and research says that mindset is more likely to foster success.

Metaphor Makeovers
How can we help students move more toward a growth mindset? Changing the national conversation about education may be the best solution, but we have to be realistic. How can we help the kids we have in the classroom right this minute? I prescribe Metaphor Makeovers! Ask students to think about how they fit in the educational system, reflect on the way they describe themselves, and then change their thinking in ways that will make them more successful.

Begin by establishing how students feel about themselves. No matter what they feel now, there are ways you can help them change their process and thinking to support a growth mindset. I begin with a writing activity like this, taken from Designing Writing Assignments:

Describe yourself as a test writer by using an analogy. Begin by completing this sentence: “When I write a timed essay, I am like a _______.” For example, you might complete the sentence this way: “When I write a timed essay, I am like a gardener.” After you’ve come up with your analogy, explore your choice in a journal entry. If I were comparing myself to a gardener, I’d talk about the way that I get started on a paper and the way that I start work on a garden— gathering seeds and tools is like gathering ideas and basic information about the writing prompt. Your response should do two things: show how you write a timed essay and make comparisons that clarify for your readers the way that you write.

Students can work in journals, informal writing, or essays. Whatever format you want. Be sure the students understand they will share what they write with the class later. To scaffold the activity, brainstorm a list of metaphors as a class that students can draw from. You might even work through an analogy together to model the kind of thinking you want them to do.

Once they have established their metaphors, you have the “before” snapshot for your makeover project. Have students share their metaphors with the class or in small groups. Talk honestly about what works and what doesn’t. You can model the classroom discussion on whatever makeover show you and students are familiar with (e.g., Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, or The Biggest Loser).

As you move to the makeover stage, students can try switching metaphors, trying on someone else’s practices, or tossing out an old practice. Make it clear students are just trying options. They can always return to the old way of doing things. Encourage trial and error. Your job is to provide feedback that encourages that growth mindset. Don’t just make suggestions though. Be sure to explain why you’re making them, just as someone on one of those television makeover shows explains suggestions.

At the end of the process, students can present “before” and “after” descriptions to the class, or you can have students write a short reflection piece on the process that the two of you discuss together. Just as they do on the shows, you might even return to the metaphors several weeks later to see how they are working—have they returned to the old ways, or sticking with the makeover?

Throughout the activity, remember to talk about how hard they are working. It’s not how smart student are that matters after all, but whether students are willing to work hard to be smarter.

From Potential to Power: Reading and Writing the National Gallery

As teachers of writing, we are acutely aware of how important the presence of an authentic audience can be for students' motivation to write. Though my state’s standards call for students to “write for real or potentially real situations” [emphasis mine], it’s a challenge to find such opportunities on a regular basis.

When I first heard about the National Gallery of Writing, I was naturally excited about the idea of NCTE launching a large-scale project to highlight the centrality of audience and publication in the writing process. I find that the Gallery has achieved that goal, and I’ve enjoyed my time spent browsing galleries that interest me and searching for entries by friends, colleagues, and community members.

It wasn’t until mid-November, though, that the real power of the Gallery became clear to me. I was at my Writing Project’s reunion dinner when a Teacher Consultant described a local gallery he curates. Knowing his students’ interest in giving voice to their ideas with a real audience, he had them submit pieces of creative writing, opinion pieces, poetry, and multi-modal compositions (many of which were about the power of language and writing in their own lives) to the Gallery. His students are incarcerated men.

I respect this colleague’s work generally, and I’m very interested in the intense social justice approach his work is taking, so I rushed home from the meeting to have a look at the submissions in the gallery, Education Justice Project: Voices from Prison. What I found there confirmed my sense of the importance of a National Gallery of Writing, as the authors represented in that gallery are truly among the most voiceless in America. Yet their writing is as poignant, thoughtful, and articulate as anything else I’ve read in the Gallery.

Though I could point to any number of examples, I encourage you to read “On ‘Being pushed’ vs. ‘Being pushed around,’” a two-part piece that contains a foreword and a letter to the author’s son. Admittedly, being a father of a young son and a believer in the power of writing myself, I’m perhaps biased in my assessment. But I think you’ll agree that, with introductory material that describes the written journal he’s keeping for his son and that specifically identifies his ability to “pour [his] emotions onto the pages that [he] writes[s]”—to say nothing of the contents of the letter itself—this is writing that both profited from and richly deserves the potential to be read.

With this in mind, take some time in the weeks to come to help ensure that the audience for the writing in the National Gallery is real—not just potentially real. Search for pieces written by children the same age as your students by using the age range filter and share them with your classes. Have students look for writing on topics that interest them by using a title keyword search. Using other search tools, such as author’s state of residence, technology used, or media type, find a piece that is particularly inspiring to you and share it on Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking site.

However you go about it, capitalize on the rich potential of the National Gallery of Writing to help get the word out about the importance of writing in every aspect of our lives.

Reading Jane Eyre in the Bathtub

Nearly every time the Kindle or Nook comes up in conversation, someone will complain that it’s just too hard to read a 600-page novel on such a little screen, and just as surely, someone will lament that you can't take an e-book into the bathtub.

You may think I’m kidding, so look at the comments on Lynn Neary’s NPR article “How E-books Will Change Reading and Writing.” Right there in the comments, Leslie Thomas (Carrington) states:

You can't take a dogeared old copy of Jane Eyre—in an electronic gadget—to the tub to read in a bubble bath.

The answer to that little problem, by the way, is to put the so-called “electronic gadget” in a Ziploc bag. That’s a little beside the point though.

The real problem is that when many people hear the term e-book, they think almost exclusively of paper-based novels (typically very long ones) that are shifted onto an electronic contraption that seems wholly unsuitable. People conjure a sort of “fish out of water” image. Or I guess to be true to the bathtub reference maybe a “synchronized swimming kittens” image would be better.

This (mis)understanding of e-books is what we teachers need to talk about. Take a few minutes to read “How E-books Will Change Reading and Writing.” Neary is talking about Twitter books and cell phone novels, and she explores how the various ways of reading digital texts shape how those texts are written.

This reshaping of how people write for online readers isn’t really new at all. Digital hypertexts have been around for over two decades. Take a look at the work of Michael Joyce for example. Yet we’re still in a society where people reject e-books because you can’t take them in the bathtub. Our job is to get people past these dated notions of texts and reading.

As teachers, we need to help students, colleagues, family members, and administrators recognize that learning 21st century literacy skills is a much more complex then simply trading ink on paper for pixels on a screen. It’s not about reading that dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre on some electronic gadget. It’s about a completely re-thought notion of what we read and how we read.

The best place to start is to ask students to pay attention to their reading habits. By noticing all the different kinds of texts they read, students begin to consciously recognize the many literacy demands in contemporary society. With this start, they create a working definition of literacy that they refine and explore further—and which they can share with their families and their wider community.

I recommend three ReadWriteThink lesson plans to begin a discussion of reading in the classroom:

• Developing a Living Definition of Reading in the Elementary Classroom (K–5)
• Developing a Definition of Reading through Investigation in Middle School (6–8)
• Defining Literacy in a Digital World (9–College)

It’s unlikely that every student will have access to an e-book reader like the Kindle or Nook in today’s classroom. But every student can get beyond the notion that the only kind of book worth reading is dog-eared and bathtub-ready.