Howard Dialectical Notebook

“We labor in error when we believe pedagogy can impart foundational textual morals—or basic skills in source citation—and thereby put an end to what we are pleased to call the “plagiarism epidemic” (219).

            Howard introduces the fallacy that composition instructors believe—that they can end plagiarism in student writing through teachings in the classroom.

 

“Pedagogy can’t fix plagiarism, because students and faculty are too much working from different economic systems” (220).

            Howard explains why she believes that teachers can’t prevent students from plagiarizing through mere lesson plans: students and teachers speak two different languages, the former being concerned with how a writing course can benefit them economically, and the latter being concerned with imparting the cultural capital of good writing.

 

“By urging on our students the importance of the “knowledge and skills” we offer to impart, we are inescapably urging that our students value us, too—that they desire to be like us, at least insofar as they are to desire the capital we hold” (223).

            Are we that desperate for acclaim? Howard makes us seem so. Though in other places she seems to sing the praises of the dedicated instructor who wants her students to succeed and become decent writer. I think she is right, though, in her assertion that we want students to want the embodied cultural capital that we want/possess. 

 

“The educational institution is a primary site for transmitting cultural capital, and that cultural capital, once acquired, becomes a tool for acquiring economic capital” (223).

            I can totally see the desire for economic capital in my students. They are told from childhood that getting a college degree directly translates into more money. No wonder they are not interested in the same capital we are. When you think about it, we are a little crazy to desire the embodied cultural capital at the expense (sometimes—at least in graduate school) of economic capital.

 

“Few of us, in fact, have not occasionally engaged in whole-category derision of our students, a discourse of long standing” (224).

            This is depressing but true. I think some of us become so jaded by our students’ apathy at the embodied cultural capital that we become offended and lash out at our students as inept when really they are focused on another type of capital.

 

“Students may regard writing in the academy not as a means of personal or intellectual growth (embodied cultural capital) but as a requirement for a grade, a credit, a degree (institutionalized cultural capital, which then translates into the accumulation of economic capital)” (226).

            Howard explains the differences between the outlooks of an instructor and a student. Instructors want intellectual growth, students want economic growth.

 

“I find this site revolting because it captures “the” writing process I and many other composition instructors inevitably convey to our students, and it turns that process into a trick—a hack—for sidestepping the very thing I am most trying to convey to my students: the joys and benefits of authentic engagement in writing and intellectual work” (227)

In her defamation of StudentHacks.org, Howard laments the loss of interaction with and interest in writing assignments that students encounter when they seek to write a research paper in ten hours. This further illustrates the students’ obsession with the goal of obtaining cultural capital, to the exclusion of any other type of capital; they view anything else as a waste of time.

 

“Quantified writing assessment aligns with the quantification of educational credentials (institutionalized cultural capital) much more closely than it does with the qualities of the individual that inhere in embodied cultural capital” (229).

            Howard seems to degrade the use of software to detect plagiarism, because it does not correlate with the values we are trying to impose upon our students. This makes me question the use of SafeAssign, and I wonder if this is why we are only using it as a teaching tool to help point out to students where they are plagiarizing? I think, used as a tool rather than as a quantifiable grader, plagiarism detection software can be useful for the classroom.

 

“…composition instructors will benefit from recognizing that students and their writing can never be brought, by pedagogy or any other means, into full compliance with instructors’ preexisting textual ideals” (230).

            Depressing. However, there is always merit in trying to understand the point of view of our students. If we intend to keep on fighting to sneak some cultural capital into their ideals, we need to know the differentiation in goals between our students and us.