Do our students “produce” papers…?
A recent post to WPA-L by J.L. McClure in response to the current discussion about plagiarism:
Here’s a passage from a working draft of a paper I received this semester about the effects of computers on the teaching of writing:
“Already English teachers aren’t needed as much as they used to be. Computers have taken the place of a lot of them. Students can go online and get the same information that an English teacher would give them. It was even proved that 64% of students get essays online, they don’t need a teacher to help them write an essay when they can buy one online, or copy and paste it. So why are English teachers needed anymore?”
When I spoke with the student about her thinking here, it was clear that she saw the purpose of English was to help students “produce” papers; if a student can now “produce” a paper by purchasing it or copying and pasting from the Internet, then all the better. I asked if she thought buying a paper online was plagiarism and she said no, that because the student pays for it, it’s the student’s. (This is a first-semester community college student who is barely passing the class, but I find her assumptions interesting. BTW, she went on to answer her question by saying English teachers wouldn’t be needed in the next few years.)
Sure, this student is missing the point in a number of different ways (the whole idea is to learn to do your own writing, after all), but I’m mostly interested in her base argument.
Are we simply asking students to “produce” papers? The cycle of write, revise, get a grade, write, revise, get a grade (Marcy Bauman establishes the difference between this and genuine communication and Geoff Sirc calls it the “academic cheese factory”) sounds suspiciously like “production” to me.
How often do students feel as though they’re not simply writing to be assessed? Yeah, we can set up genuine opportunities for communication within the classroom. But how many of us actually succeed at doing this?