Though, I very much enjoyed these weeks’ readings, it is impossible for me to post this entry without wondering how it is that Pennycook (p. 1) managed to steal my idea of plagiarism being a notion that belongs to a particular vision of the world that should not be generalized and taken for granted in all cultures worldwide. After making this statement, I would like to provide evidence to prove that this idea is mine. The first time I ‘conceived’ this idea in my mind was during a visit to an exotic part of Colombia where I stayed at an indigenous settlement. Through informal conversations I got to understand a little bit about their worldview and beliefs. Their language did not have a written form; therefore, their ancestral history was only transmitted from the elderly to the young in the form of spoken narratives. These narratives were not subject of any dispute or debate; they should be accepted as they were. When asked how these stories have come to existence, the mamo (the spiritual leader of the community) asserted they were not the property of any human being. They made up the essence of their people and, though these stories presented some variation depending on who was narrating them (there was a lot of variation depending on the oratory of the teller and other factors), nobody could claim ownership over those words. In modern words, those stories were not copyrighted. Unlike the world I came from, the concept of property over ideas did not exist.
Coming back to my initial point, I am now considering the need to write a book (or a journal article) every time I visit an indigenous community. Or, every time I have think of a profound, elaborated idea.
Apparently, Pennycook took advantage of this, and was not satisfied by taking only one idea away from me. I also found out that he fragrantly decided to plagiarize my belief that there is not a single idea that has not been ever thought, or at least, that no idea is entirely original. Everyone resorts to other people’s ideas to formulate their own. Sometimes these regain validity; sometimes they are more pertinent, sometimes they are structured in different ways. But yet, they are the same idea. Somehow Pennycook managed to steal this thought from me, and used a fancy quotation by Goethe to justify his so-called academic crime (for which he himself cynically gives it a name)
One idea that he could not steal from me (or probably he did?) was that plagiarism is an individual decision, conscious or unconscious, but still individual. And that if we are to agree that plagiarism is a bad practice in academic writing we have to provide our students with the criterion they need to make much more informed decisions when writing. It is not only a matter of warning them, but of helping them understand the implications of not citing authorized scholars (as much as your ideas may be yours and no one else’s), of how to correctly include these references. These matters are much more important when teaching L2 writing, since sometimes L2 learning implies the understanding and apprehension of certain cultural values alien to our own.
However, and to my own misery, Pennycook closes his article by stealing another of my ideas. Due to the fact that learning a second language implies learning a set of cultural conventions and rules, and that in second language learning, learners many times borrow other’s identities and ideas (or other’s words according to Pennycook) plagiarism issues must be approached with an empathetic attitude in the first place. Applying straightforward (or dogmatic as he puts it – but I can swear I thought of this first) institutional rules or adopting strictly normative attitudes towards learners who go through struggle to understand what plagiarism is, may not bring the best outcomes.
Like these, many of Pennycook’s ideas are actually mine! I thought of them first! Why would he steal them from me? I can swear I never read them anywhere! They just came to my mind naturally! What can I do to get my ideas back? I know what you may be thinking by now, you probably think I stole these ideas to write this text, but that is not true! I swear! I have never stolen anything from anyone!!!!
Wait, I think the title of this entry sounds pretty much familiar to me... Have I seen it anywhere? Let me think…
No comments:
Post a Comment