Academic Virtues Research Articles

Editorial Vol-1-Issue-1-2005

Editorial Vol-1-Issue-1-2005

Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a context --- using the Internet as an information tool --- where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internet-enhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to "catch the cheats" send a "don't get caught" message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.

The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914 by Keely s> Stauter-Halsted (review)

564 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 and generally felicitous edition is a valuable addition to an area of Russian historyunder-representedin existingEnglish-languageliterature. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ROGER BARTLETT University College London Stauter-Halsted,Keely. 7heNationintheVillage.7he Genesis ofPeasant National IdentityinAustrian Poland,I848-I914. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, and London, 200I. X+ 272 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?3?.95. STARTING with the annexationof Cracow,thelastfragmentof an independent Poland, by the Austrian Empire in I846 and the abolition of serfdom throughout Habsburgjurisdiction in I848, this meticulous scholarly investigation follows the social development of the peasantry over the next halfcentury , with the accent on the growth of a sense of 'Polishness' across 'Austrian Poland'. Coverage of 'high politics', as played out by peasant delegates to the Reichsratin Vienna and the Sejm in L'viv,is subordinatedto a detailed sociological, even ethnographic and occasionally anthropological examination of the transformation of the village and rural economy of a backward region which was fortunate to find itself within the relatively progressiveCisleithanianhalfof the Dual MonarchyofAustria-Hungaryafter I867. Perhaps the dominant overall theme is the accelerating impact of 'external' societal modernization, promoting a growing (if often one-sided) dialogue between the village and the town within Galicia itself, and an increasingly politicized civil awareness of the contextual setting of Galicia within both the Habsburgstateand partitionedPoland. The academic virtues of the volume, immaculately produced by Cornell University Press, are self-evident. Research has been based upon the enterprising and systematic exploration of previously unmined primary documentation from archives in Cracow, L'viv,Warsawand Wroclaw. And notjust literarydocumentation:a selectionof contemporaryillustrationsfrom the EthnographicMuseum in Cracow both enhances and relieves a rich but often demanding text. The principalfindingof the researchis the recognition of an emergent peasant 6lite which, stimulated by consciousness-raising experiences of conscription and migration, crystallizedthrough associational activities like membership of 'agricultural circles' and the operation of communal self-government. Increasinglyexplicit in the identification of this new stratum of assertive 'aristocratic peasants' is the author's scenario of a burgeoning engagement of the peasantry in national politics which owes little to the conventional notion of exploitative nationialist recruitment of the peasantry from above by a frustrated but manipulative gentry. While not endorsing either the populist or 'primordialist' v,iew of spontaneous mobilization from below, Stauter-Halsted posits the rapid development, often overtly anti-Semitic, of a 'critical mass' of upper peasants prepared to collaborate with the hitherto-despised lesser gentry. To express a sophisticated argument REVIEWS 565 simplistically,the societal dynamic of late nineteenth-centuryPolishnationalism , most certainlynot bottom-up, was essentiallya potent combination of the traditionaltop-down and what may be termedthe new 'middle-up'. What shortcomings are inherent in the study are all reflections of its monographic limitations. Even for an unapologetically specialiststudy, there is too much of the unreconstructed doctoral thesis, while opportunities for 'opening up' a sometimes hermetic text to improve reader accessibilityhave not been exploited. In termsof chronologicalscope, the emphasisis solidlyon the last two decades of the nineteenth century, tantalizinglydownplayingthe crucial decade before the FirstWorld War. In terms of geographical range, the focus is not really on the entire crownland of Galicia but only western Galicia: Ruthenian-dominated eastern Galicia where Polish settlement was fundamentally diasporic gets short shrift.At the structurallevel, there is no wayinwhich abroadercontextualdiscussion,preferablydrawingcomparisons with the other two partitioned territories of 'Poland', can be satisfactorily accommodated in a 'Conclusion'of barelyfourpages. At the illustrativelevel, the sole map provided showsonly the demographyof Polishsettlementwithin Galicia itself. Somewhat revealingly,there are no maps to illustrateeitherthe geographicallocation of Galiciawithin the HabsburgEmpireor the geopolitical relationshipof Galiciawithin partitioned'Poland'. None of these reservations, predominantly concerning sins of omission ratherthan sinsof commission, detractsfromthe demonstrablescholarshipof the study. Indeed, within its monographic confines, 7he Nationin the Village prompts a generous run of intriguing questions pertinent to (and often challenging)the prevailinghistoriographyof nationalismand the peasantryin Poland.At veryleast, at a timewhen late nineteeth-centuryPolishnationalism has been cast in a glaringly negative light, most notably in Brian Porter's recent WhenNationalism Beganto Hate (New York and Oxford, 2000), the appearance of an authoritative interpretation which serves as an historiographical alternative (or even corrective)by illuminating its more positive featuresmustbe enthusiasticallywelcomed. Department ofHistory RAYMOND PEARSON University ofUlster atColeraine Frank,Tibor. Ethnicity...

The Ins, Outs, and In-Betweens of Multigenre Writing

my colleagues of the value of this type of assignment. Several of my colleagues generously took the time after the meeting to look through the projects and celebrate their excellence. Sharing my students' writing is a wonderful way to let my work as an educator speak for my methodology, but I owe myself and my colleagues a more thoughtful analysis of the academic virtues of multigenre projects. My strongest motivation for studying multigenre writing is the compelling responses of my students who have authored writing projects that have awed me with their power and elegance. I am moved to think of my students' writing as more than reports or papers. They are works of art, not simply because of their visual or poetic inclusions, but because of their aesthetic meaningfulness. For support of my point about aesthetics, I turn to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic, whose scholarship masterfully presents a similar case for accepting the dialogic language of the novel as art. Yet as I do so, I fully realize that some would not accept the mixed quality of these multigenre projects as academic writing. Perhaps the most persuasive argument that I can marshal to convince others of the usefulness of the multigenre assignment is that this type of writing requires much more in the way of academic skills than the minimal requisites of the traditional monogenre research paper. Combining these two perspectives, to foster writing as both an art and a skill, demonstrates how multigenre writing can be utilized to teach critical analysis, documentation of sources, and aesthetic unity. Before examining multigenre writing in more depth, I need to respond to the myth of the traditional college research paper format. most authoritative voice that I can invoke on this matter is that of composition scholar and journal editor, Richard Larson. In his article, The 'Research Paper' in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing, he explains that universities house a plethora of conflicting disciplines, all of which have competing notions of what academic research requires. I would add to Larson's critique that in any one area of study such as polymer engineering, market research, or geriatric sociology, what qualifies as research itself has probably changed significantly in the last twentyfive years and will continue to change, perhaps even more rapidly in the future. Understandably, high school teachers and general education professors harbor the unrealistic desire that one report format could be decided upon that would satisfy all of the disciplines and all of the courses at the university. If

Between apathy and advocacy: Teaching and modeling ethical reflection

AbstractAdvocacy may be unavoidable, but this tendency does not license use of classrooms as platforms for partisan persuasion. Teaching governed by fundamental academic virtues will responsibly call students to genuine, fruitful engagement with political and ethical issues.

"Je Me Vois Poète:" Children's Poetry in Contemporary Canada

"Je Me Vois Poète:"Children's Poetry in Contemporary Canada Dr. William Blackburn Choosing poetry for children is an invidious task at the best of times. Even if we don't personally encounter that ubiquitous child with the gumption to ask "WHY should I read this?", even if we manage to forget that the child of four is as different from the 'child' of eighteen as Los Angeles is from Atlantis, our choice still requires us to decide why poetry is important at all. Most of us would agree, I think—at least in theory—that we value poetry because it broadens our horizons, because it declares certain of our values, because it gives us pleasure and also because it raises wholesome doubts about our notions of who and what we are, because it is that rarest of modern commodities, a source of fruitful disturbance. But many people feel uneasy about "poems for children" which attempt to do these things, in the well-meaning but misguided belief that children ought to be protected from at least some of the anxieties of modern life. They cannot be so protected, of course—it's their world too—and they resent being lied or condescended to. If we attempt to raise them on a diet of "nice" poems, or on poems which reflect our notion of what children ought to be, all we can expect is that they won't develop a taste for poetry, and that we will have robbed them of a life-long source of solace, self-awareness, and community. If we expose them to poems we like, and to poems which speak honestly to us as adults, we are at least being straight with them. And we can hope they'll discover that poetry is for everyone, not merely for some bizarre academic sub-species of homo sapiens, and that poetry is ultimately valuable because it speaks for all of us, because, in the words of twelve-year-old Serge Guindon, "Je me vois poète." Canadians are particularly fortunate in that there are some good books of Canadian poetry for children now available. One I especially like is The Wind Has Wings: Poems from Canada, ed. Mary A. Downit and Barbara Robertson, with illustrations by Elizabeth Cleaver (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968). The table of contents suggests that dreariest of academic virtues—representativeness—but this is really a nice anthology, even thoug the index reads like a Who's Who of Canadian [End Page 6] poets. The book contains seventy-two poems by over fifty poets, from hoary stalwarts like Bliss Carman, Robert Service, and Archibald Lampman, to prominent moderns like A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Earle Birney. Its variety is not merely chronological, however; there are some translations from French, Yiddish and Eskimo, as well as a couple of folk songs. The book is recommended by the publishers for grades four to seven, and contains the usual animal poems, descriptive pieces, and fantasy—most of them of unusual quality. There are clever and funny word games like George Lanigan's "Threnody" on the death of the Ahkond of Swat, and James Mille's "Sweet Maiden of Passamaquoddy" (what would you rhyme with Skodawabskook?), as well as more substantial offerings for older children. Cleaver's bold, bright colour illustrations further enhance an intelligent and sensitive collection. One poet not represented in this anthology who has recently come to prominence in the field is Toronto's Dennis Lee, author of Alligator Pie (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975). Lee states that he "developed a twitch" when he started reading nursery rhymes to his children, because "the details of Mother Goose . . . had becomes exotic." Part of his motive in writing these poems was "not abolishing Mother Goose, but letting her take up residence among hockey sticks and high-rise too." Despite this dubious motive, Lee has produced some good things in these books. Some of these poems are embarrassingly derivative, poor mimicry of Belloc and Milne, Lear and Carroll ("If You Should Meet a Grundiboob"), but there is some delightful word=play which I'm told that children, innocent of our knowledge of sources and analogues, revel in. Certain of these...