Student attitudes toward intellectual property.

Abstract

This article discusses the tensions that exist for students in writing classrooms between collaborative workshopping of papers and individual notions of intellectual property ownership. In order to adjust to students' confusion, this article suggests that teachers give more graded weight to metawritings, in which students discuss their writing processes and those who contributed to them, rather that putting sole focus on the writings themselves. By focusing students' energies and anxieties on the processes by which they create writing, teachers can better address issues of intellectual property in the classroom.

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Candace Spigelman, in her book Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups, notes that students in writing classes often express trepidation over sharing their work with other students, often going so far as to skip class on workshop days or refusing to discard rough drafts in the computer lab for fear that peers might appropriate their ideas (126). In her observations of four students who worked together as a workshopping group in her writing class, the tensions between individual work and collaborative processes became even clearer. For example, when reviewing videotapes of their workshop sessions, the four students spoke about their responses in corporate terms, using the pronoun "we," as in "'We weren't sure if we should put a question mark'" (qtd. in Spigelman 86-87). Yet when interviewing the author about his group's responses to his paper, he minimized their role, stating that the writing group was just helping him make decisions about his work; the author felt that despite the group's input, he still retained sole authorship over the text (89-90).

However, would the above author have been writing his own paper had he used wording supplied to him by others? Had that wording been appropriated from an unacknowledged published source, the answer would be no--he would be plagiarizing. Yet had the wording been supplied by fellow students during a workshop session, then the answer becomes not as clear cut. When portions of a student's paper (or the entire paper itself) do not "sound" like what a teacher has come to know as the typical written "voice" of the student (assuming that the teacher has had the luxury of familiarizing him/herself with a body of the student's written work), then the teacher is likely to accuse that student of academic dishonesty. Yet, in workshop sessions, writing teachers encourage this flee exchange of ideas and expression. So while an exchange of knowledge, information, and text seems to exist without penalty to some extent at the student-to-student level, once students begin to deal with published texts, oral interviews with knowledgeable subjects, or information obtained through email or Web sites, this knowledge is no longer "free" and any attempt at such exchange results in severe academic penalties.

Given that plagiarism has become a high-profile issue both in academia and in the media, how should teachers of writing regulate the exchange of information during workshops? Should teachers require that students cite their workshop groups as sources? Or should teachers consider the information exchanged during writing workshops an "other," a category which exists outside discussions of intellectual property?

As a graduate student, I taught in a freshman composition program that had a common course guide, syllabus and, in many cases, common readings for all sections. Therefore, common paper topics among not only students in one class but also among students in several sections of the course were certainly not uncommon. When related topics would emerge in my class, I would encourage students to work together during workshop sessions in the hopes that the students would share research sources. While some students were perfectly happy to share, most students reacted negatively, expressing to me the fear of intellectual theft that Spigelman's students confided to her. Deborah Tannen, in her book The Argument Culture, identifies this antagonistic spirit as "The Culture of Critique" and notes that the academy fosters, both in written work and in speaking, an atmosphere in which one has to attack--rather than build upon--the arguments and ideas of others in order to stabilize and further one's own position in the academy (268-69), an argument also forwarded by Christina Crosby in a recent College English article. While students writing in a freshman composition class may not be interested per se in stabilizing their position in the academy, they are at least interested in producing passable writing in order to get through the course. Yet while the academy, in terms of student grades, tenure requirements, and academic honesty standards valorizes the individual and individual work, in composition courses teachers encourage students to "work together" during workshops to help improve each other's texts. By the same token, the working world which students will most likely enter values teamwork, although at times the product of such teamwork is copywritten under a corporate logo or presented publicly under the name of the head of a research team.

Andrea Lunsford, who frequently collaborates with other authors in the field of composition studies, has issued a wake-up call for writing instructors to pay attention to issues of intellectual property in the context of collaborative work in the academy. Along with her co-authors and drawing in part on an essay by Esther Dyson, Lunsford has suggested that in this age of the rapid exchange of information of the Internet, teachers should use the metaphor of a computer network to discuss processes of writing. Just as content in cyberspace is shaped by its movement through a network's myriad users and producers, content (writing) in the writing classroom is shaped by its movement through the "network" of others who shape our language (Lunsford and West "Intellectual Property ..." 401-03, Lunsford et al. "What Matters Who Writes? ..." 4, 13). Dyson herself notes that in the context of a network "intellectual assets and property depreciate while intellectual processes and services appreciate" (qtd. in Lunsford and West 401). In other words, if one views the network metaphor in terms of the writing classroom, the value of the writing itself becomes less important than the processes which helped to create that writing.

While students are already required by the academy to acknowledge the research processes involved in their writing through the inclusion of in-text and end-of-essay documentation (and a failure to meet this requirement is considered plagiarism), research sources, to follow the ideas of Dyson and Lunsford et al., compose only a small portion of the writing "network." The "network," however, would seem to be composed of not only research sources, but in-class peer responders, one's teacher, one's parents, one's grade school and high school teachers, every book one has ever read ... in other words, the network is a social-construction that is obviously too vast to include in a Works Cited page. The role that the network plays in shaping student writing needs to be interrogated at every turn: students not only need to engage in process-oriented activities in the classroom, but they should also be encouraged to explore and question the role of both in-class and out-of-class activities in shaping their writing. Many teachers, myself included, have adopted the use of "metawriting"--writing about the processes of writing--as a means for students to write/think about the contexts within which their writings develop. As another form of metawriting, Elaine Maimon proposes the idea of students writing acknowledgments pages, much like those found at the beginnings of published books, as a way for them to recognize peer group involvement in the production of their papers (387). I have also used this idea with student portfolio introductions and encouraged students to acknowledge those outside the class (other teachers, friends, tutors, parents, etc.) who played a role in the formation of their writing as well.

Even with metawritings in place in my classes, however, some students still feel compelled to plagiarize, so obviously the opportunity to reflect on writing and the "network" surrounding its development does little in some students' cases to help them learn about the social implications of intellectual property. In other words, some students are willing to sacrifice a few points off their grades for a non-existent draft and/or metawriting in favor of a good grade on a research paper, an interesting statement about what teachers value in a writing class and students' responses to those values. If in the network of the writing classroom, as mentioned above, the value of the writing itself becomes less important than the processes which helped to create that writing, and if we must still teach in a system that mandates that we assign students a final grade at the end of a course, then putting more of the grade emphasis on metawritings rather than the writings themselves would be a logical conclusion. Christopher C. Weaver terms this type of grading "process grading," noting that in Pat Belanoff's research, writers characterized by reviewers as "skilled" frequently employed metacognitive commentary about their writing when asked to reflect on their writing processes ("Grading" 146). In other words, by teaching students to effectively reflect on their writing and by putting the grade emphasis on these reflections, teachers will not be sacrificing student writing improvement; by working to improve their metawriting, students are by turns working to improve their writing.

While the assigning of grades to any aspect of writing processes appears to do little to alleviate the culture of commodification growing within our universities, grading the discussion of the processes that facilitate the development of writing can potentially be a step in the right direction. Perhaps through contextualizing their writing as part of a larger network of individuals and texts, students and teachers can investigate how approaching writing as a commodity (in this case within the context of the workshopping process) does, or--more importantly--does not contribute to what writers believe to be their "own" writing.

Works Cited

Belanoff, Pat. "Freewriting: An Aid to Rereading Theorists." Nothing Begins with N: New Investigations of Freewriting. Pat Belanoff, Peter Elbow, and Sheryl Fontaine, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Crosby, Christina. "Writer's Block, Merit, and the Market: Working in the University of Excellence." College English 66.6 (2003): 626-27.

Dyson, Esther. "Intellectual Value." 1995. Wired. 8 Nov. 2003 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/dyson.hmtl>.

Lunsford, Andrea, and Susan West. "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 47.3 (1996): 383-411.

Lunsford, Andrea, with Rebecca Rickly, Michael J. Salvo, and Susan West. "What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds? Issues of Ownership in the Writing Classroom." 1996. Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments. 8 Nov. 2003 <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/binder.html? features/lunsford/title.html>.

Maimon, Elaine P., Gerald L. Belcher, Gall W. Hearn, Barbara F. Nodine, and Finbarr W. O'Connor. Readings in the Arts and Sciences. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 387.

Spigelman, Candace. Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. New York: Random House, 1998.

Weaver, Christopher C. "Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom." The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Frances Zak and Christopher C. Weaver, eds. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 141-50.

Amy Ward Martin, Pace University, NY

Martin is an assistant professor of English and Writing Center Director. Her academic interests include plagiarism and intellectual property, peer response, and assessment.