Week 2/Day 5—Wednesday, August 31

Homework Due

  • Read the following sections from JTCR:
  • Chapter 3: “How can I take notes?” (about attribution and paraphrasing)
  • Chapter 7: “How can I ensure I’ve avoided unintentional plagiarism?”
  • As you read about these skills, answer (type please) the following question: How does an understanding of these skills maintain academic integrity? Why does it matter?
  • Read the first two articles for your rhetorical summary portfolio from FOOD and type a key point summary outline ONLY (you’ll be submitting these outlines to Canvas on Friday with another outline, so hold onto them for now):

 "'Take My Job!' Campaign Markets Agricultural Labor" - anonymous author

 "Indigenous Diets Can Help Fight Modern Illnesses, Experts Say" anonymous author

Lesson Objectives

  • Discuss theses of first two A1 articles in relation to the course theme.
  • Develop an understanding of what academic integrity is, in the class and at the university
  • Develop an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism and develop strategies for how to avoid plagiarism; in particular, learning how to appropriately and effectively paraphrase, quote, and attribute sources

Connections to Course Goals

Today’s focus is on developing an understanding of what plagiarism is and developing strategies for avoiding plagiarism. This connects explicitly to the overarching course goal of “Learning important elements of academic discourse, such as […] using sources effectively and ethically, and writing effective summaries, analyses […].”

Prep

Closely read “’Take my Job!’” and “Indigenous Diets.” Review CSU’s academic integrity ideas (the honor pledge, in particular) and the consequences for students who plagiarize. Review what constitutes plagiarism. Review notes about paraphrase, direct quotation, and attribution.

Materials

  • WTL for “’Take my Job!’” and “Indigenous Diets.”
  • Computer with video on academic integrity (see link below)
  • Quoting and Paraphrasing handout (available in A1: Appendix)
  • Directions for Activity

ACTIVITIES

Attendance (2 min)

WTL and Discussion of Articles (15 min)

The purpose of this WTL is to hold students accountable for the reading, but ALSO to create discussion about some of the issues the course theme raises. Here is a possible WTL…OR… feel free to adapt the WTL to suit your own classroom needs.

Use the WTL as a springboard for this conversation. Since these are for A1, you may want to touch upon various rhetorical elements at work—especially in terms of context.

WTL

  1. Which counterarguments does Martin bring up with his guests? How might this appeal to his listeners?
  2. This article quotes Harriet Kuhnlein who writes that, “Traditional food systems need to be documented so that policymakers know what is at stake by ruining an ecosystem, not only for the indigenous peoples living there, but for everyone.” What specifically does the article claim is at stake?

Transition: The articles you read for homework helped you start to listen in to the conversation on food. We’re going to spend the rest of today discussing and practicing how to ethically and accurately represent what you’re hearing in this conversation when you begin to summarize for Assignment #1.

Academic Integrity at CSU (15 min)

CSU has an honor pledge in place. Across the entire campus, for all major tests and assignments, you are supposed to write and sign an honor pledge. What this is meant to do is to help establish a culture of academic integrity here at CSU. In this class, for every major project, students will be asked to write out the honor pledge and sign it.

Watch the first 5-7 minutes of this video featuring our former Director of Academic Integrity here at CSU explaining the honor pledge. (Try it on your computer before class – you may need to install a plug in). Before watching, ask students to listen for the claim about why we have an honor pledge, and to think about why the authors made the rhetorical choice to feature interviews from faculty and students. http://mediasite.colostate.edu/Mediasite/Viewer/?peid=01402b2ddaed4d80bf2fabb5a483a6e71d

Discuss the claim and reasons behind the honor pledge and why they used interviews. You may want to ask students’ opinions of the honor pledge and if they’ve ever heard of honor pledges before to open up discussion a bit more.

So, what happens if you are caught plagiarizing?

Step 1: Instructor and Student meet—student will understand how/why what they did was considered plagiarism (or be able to prove it wasn’t).

Step 2: Instructor reports incident of plagiarism to Director of Composition AND to Student Conflict Resolution.

Step 3: Consequences of the plagiarism will be sent to student.

Consequences can include the following: failure of the assignment; failure of the course; removal of the repeat/delete option for the course; hearing with Conflict Resolution…and it CAN get worse from there, but only if what you’ve done is ridiculously egregious.

This could lead into a conversation of what is considered plagiarism. Not properly attributing borrowed information is the number 1 on the list. There are varying shades of gray, of course. Review your notes from Orientation and/or ASK COMP FACULTY if you are unsure whether or not something constitutes plagiarism.

Transition: Now that we know what “counts” as plagiarism and what happens if you do it, let’s work on something that will help us avoid plagiarizing: correctly quoting and paraphrasing.

Quoting and Paraphrasing Handout (20 min)

Ask students to briefly share a few responses that they typed for homework connecting paraphrasing and attribution to academic integrity. You may want to collect these.

Go through the Quoting and Paraphrase handout found in the A1: Appendix. This seems like a basic activity, but students often struggle a lot with putting theory into practice with their paraphrasing. Rather than lecturing, an alternative way to present this information is to distribute the handout, have students get into pairs, and give them several minutes to read through the first half of the handout and pick out the most important concepts. After about 5 minutes of the pair brainstorm, bring the whole class back together and create a list of the concepts learned. A list from the major concepts learned from the handout might look something like the following:

  • What did you learn about quoting and paraphrasing? (Record answers on board)
  • When should you quote, for example? (original is so clever that a paraphrase would lessen impact, original is precise and to change would alter meaning, original is concise and a paraphrase would double the original).
  • When should you paraphrase? (when you shouldn’t quote).
  • How do you paraphrase?
  • Use synonyms
  • Change structure
  • Check that meaning hasn’t changed
  • Check that tone hasn’t changed
  • Attribute

Transition: So, let’s practice—paraphrase the excerpt at the bottom of your handout. Then, follow the instructions to mark-up words and structure that you’ve kept and changed.

Once students have completed the activity individually, ask for a few volunteers to share their paraphrasing by bringing it up to the doc cam. Help guide students through effective paraphrasing practices – look for examples that are too close to the original (3+ words in a row) or meaning that has changed. Help them think of strategies to paraphrase by asking questions like “Why are words like “students” or “engineers” okay to keep? Why might we change words like “increase”?”

Conclude Class and Assign Homework

  1. Look at the interactive example of a rhetorical precis on the Oregon State website. Note that our class assignment requires including ALL key points, and so that section will be more than one sentence. You’ll have some freedom to expand and rearrange some parts of this genre, but you can have a general idea of what you’ll be writing for Assignment 1. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/rhetorical-precis/sample/peirce_sample_precis_click.html
  2. Read “Responding to Other Students’ Writing” by Straub to prepare for workshop. As you read, consider how his description of response is similar or different to your own experiences and which practices you may want to try in our first workshop next week. Bring this article to class!
  3. Read “Chapter 2” from The Real Cost of Cheap Food by Carolan in the FOOD reader.
  4. Type a summary outline for “Chapter 2.”
  5. Post all three summary outlines to Discussion #2: Key Point Outlines by Friday at the beginning of class.
  6. Read through someone else’s summary outlines after class on Friday. Comment on their outlines to discuss how similar or different your ideas were by Sunday at 11:59 PM. Be sure to look back at your own post on Monday to see comments from your peers.

Connection to Next Class

Today students learned some more specific skills to summarize effectively for A1. They’ll be reading an example of their A1 genre for homework, and the next class, they’ll be looking at some student examples and looking ahead to how to have an effective peer review workshop.