I recently read an article in the New York Times about plagiarism and how students nowadays are becoming more and more clueless as to what constitutes infringement of other people’s intellectual property. If it is posted on the Internet, it must be in public domain right? No.
As a storyteller, when I want to perform a story that has been written somewhere, I need to check and see if the tale I want to tell is in public domain or owned by a particular writer or teller. Once that is determined I then can either tell the story freely or must seek permission from the original author, teller, or publishing company.
For me this becomes an issue when I can’t find that author or who holds the rights to the story, especially if the author has died.
As a teacher I always emphasized giving credit. Whatever project you were doing you needed to give credit to where you got the information used. That included graphics from other sources.
Too many times in my earlier years of teaching, I would be handed in work that was clearly not done by the students. I could only guess who helped. I can’t remember where I got the idea from, but for the last 3 years of teaching my students had to have their parents sign on their projects if their parents helped in any way. If the student asked a question that got answered or a suggestion from their parent was given that somehow ended up in their project, it had to be signed. This was promoted, even to parents, not as being negative against the student, but teaching the student to acknowledge credit for work contributed. Working collaboratively is a good thing.
I wish more educators would require students to give credit from the moment children begin school. By doing that they can instill in their students its importance and begin to lead them away from plagiarizing.
Another activity that I did with students dealt with writing in your own words. I would pick a short article, such as one about ostriches, something that they were not familiar with. They were required to listen as I read the article three times. The first time they could only listen and not write anything. The second and third time as I read the article they could stop me at any point if I read something that seemed important for a report on “Life cycle of an ostrich”. When I was stopped, they could write down one or two words that would help remind them of what I had read (no more). There was a lot of group sharing of possible words when I was stopped, though each student could pick his own. I would continue reading, they would stop me and the process would continue until I had finished reading the third time and they had a list of words on a sheet of paper.
I then instructed them to write their reports. When they were finished writing, I would give them a copy of the article I read so they could check for anything that they had missed or got incorrectly. When all the reports were handed in, every student had a differently worded report on the same topic using the same resource. It was amazing how different the writing was from the slowest students to the more advanced students. They all used the same material and each report was well written.
I would like to think that those students as they went on to higher grades continued to use that technique to create writing that was their own. However, I don’t think one year of teaching a skill, when copying and cutting and pasting from the Internet is so much easier works. That technique and others like it need to be done consistently throughout the grades.
We need to really think about how we teach our children and what we expect from them. We also need to model the behaviors that we are teaching otherwise the changes in our society that are leading us to plagiarize will continue.
