I’m the Mechanic

When most of us buy a vehicle, or pay to maintain a vehicle, an insidious feeling wells up in our core. It is the feeling of collaboration paired with distrust. We simultaneously want to learn, discuss, and agree on the realities of our vehicle as represented by the other party….all the while exuding whatever guile we can muster to seem as if we are an expert, as we must posture ourselves for the other party is surely deceiving us somehow.

I do the same when I speak to my colleagues about curriculum. Perhaps, this is an example of Aoki’s (1986) concept of dwelling between planned and lived curriculum, albeit a negatively charged one. I fall back on the written documentation of the (planned) curriculum when discussing how to improve it with my colleagues, as the reality of what it is can be read. However, they and I both have implicit ideas of biases of why our changes are better: we both believe that we “get” how to be the better teacher than the other.

My original metaphor for curriculum was that it was like the auto industry. As it changes, it is reacting to appease the masses, its customers. Enough of the populace wants cars that are better for our future? The industry shifts to hybrids and electric cars. The populace wants more reliability and transparency? The industry publishes their rationale, practices, and even creates committees to review said things regularly. Mechanics, the experts of course, always have their own agenda and you probably know better than them.

Through researching Grammarly and other plagiarism checkers, I’ve come to realize that instead of my metaphor changing, my role in it has changed; I might be a mechanic. To extend my metaphor, suppose the environment in the pacific changed and snow blanketed Hawaii. How long before the residents there would accept the need snow-tires? Mechanics would surely recommend them! While it would likely prove to be a sudden transition, residents would accept the recommendations of the Mechanics if they could demonstrate their effectiveness, right?

This brings me to my position in this metaphor. I find the B.C. curriculum needs and adjustment in the area of Academic Integrity, as our own blizzard, the shift to total remote teaching, has struck. Suddenly, educators and students alike are immersed in an environment fraught with the dangers of plagiarism and cheating with no real manual to fall back on. Mechani-…, Teachers know of plagiarism and cheating of course, but the planned curriculum of simply policing it is no longer sufficient; no growth will occur.

In my research regarding proactive versus reactive responses to Academic Integrity, I argued for more responsibility to be placed on the educator in providing opportunities for students to learn how to generate original composition, while denouncing the usefulness of plagiarism checkers or proctoring software. It was mainly the work of Stuart Wrigley who inspired me, as he argued that “the focus is still very much on student writing, not student writers” (Wrigley, 2017). He pointed out that this problem was due to the way educators are assessing their students:

The problem revolving around much of this is that most of what students write is assessed: there seems precious little time to focus on the students as writers. Their development as authors is stymied by not having a chance to grow outside the write-submit-mark regime of university academic writing (Wrigley, 2017).

Unfortunately, I would say that I have engaged in the same “regime” at the grade eight level. I would extend that claim and say it is likely common practice in the grades following as well (I will have to do a poll). I believe educators engage in this routine for the curriculum does not offer black-and-white points on how students should be given the opportunities to learn how to write compositions about texts and research, while still including excerpts from said texts.

I wonder, is this an implicit goal in the curriculum? For example, Wrigley quoted Bakhtin in his essay, describing how “all language is ‘second hand’: utterances have been used before and will be used again – what Bakhtin terms the ‘already spoken-about’ and the ‘not-yet-spoken-about’; in this sense, nothing anyone says (or writes) is original in the literal sense of the word (Wrigley, 2017).

However, instead proposing new ways for students to respond to texts, our traditional curriculum puts emphasis on citing or paraphrasing text by manipulating it, thereby “putting it on our words”…instead of exploring the figurative idea of the term “original” can actually mean. We are then shown tools that are reactive means to verify the students’ works. In teaching that “copying is bad” with this method, are we following to an ascribed curriculum important to post-secondary institutions?

Moving forwards, I believe I am bound by my own ethics to comprehensively teach the differences between proactive and reactive measures to plagiarism and cheating, even if our curriculum does not explicitly require me to do so. Luckily, my employer guarantees my autonomy in such things, which may be some wiggle room which has been implicitly designed. But more importantly, Aoki’s concept has given me a new way to think about approaching curriculum: if I want to be an effective teacher,  I will teach the things I’m supposed to, but also teach the things I need to.

References

Aoki, T. (1986). Teaching as Indwelling Between Two Curriculum Worlds. The B.C. Teacher, 65 (3),

April/May.

Wrigley, S. (2017). Avoiding ‘de-plagiarism’: Exploring the affordances of handwriting in the essay-writing process – Stuart Wrigley, 2019. Active Learning in Higher Education. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1469787417735611?utm_source=summon&utm_medium=discovery-provider