A Foucauldian-Vygotskian Analysis of the Pedagogy of Academic Integrity

This paper provides a Foucauldian-Vygotskian analysis of the pedagogy of academic integrity in the North American post-secondary context. In particular, the issue of ‘unintentional plagiarism’ is examined. The main implication of this analysis is that the notion of unintentional plagiarism places students, particularly junior students, in a position of being asked to engage with complicated academic discourses in the absence of any internalized sense of academic integrity. This occurs because the removal of intent from the concept of academic integrity undermines its meaning, and this leads students to believe that they do not have access to the monitoring processes that they need in order to ensure that their work is properly cited. Several suggestions for improving the pedagogy of academic integrity emerge from this analysis and these are outlined in the paper.


Introduction
without purpose. Furthermore, the phenomenon identified as "patchwriting" by Howard (1992;1999) appears to reflect genuine attempts to engage with research literature by changing some of the words and sentence structure in order to fit one's own paper. Anecdotally, I can attest to the fact that some students believe this to be an effective strategy for incorporating sources. I have had students over the years ask me how many words have to be changed in order for a quotation to become a paraphrase. In one case, a student simply informed me that copying seven words in a row constitutes plagiarism, but fewer than that does not. It would seem that the quasi-legal approach to plagiarism has led students towards legalistic approaches to source incorporation.
In the program in which I primarily work, teaching students to incorporate source materials effectively is an official learning outcome. Therefore, instructors in our program have more flexibility than most others would do when it comes to dealing with matters of patchwriting and knowledgetelling. Under the direction of departmental leadership, the instructors are able to judge whether or not a particular textual instance reflects a learning issue or whether it might represent an intention to deceive the instructor about authorship. The former is an opportunity for an instructor to meet with students one-to-one to guide them towards more acceptable practices.
However, most faculty members at my institution (and, most likely, many others), do not have this luxury because their courses are not explicitly concerned with the teaching of writing. Even courses that fulfill the written requirement at the University of Manitoba are typically designated as such because of the amount of writing that students are asked to complete, not because the content of the course focuses on writing processes (University of Manitoba, n.d.). Therefore, faculty members generally are required to pass along instances of "transgressive intertextuality" (Chandrasoma et al., 2004) to department heads, who may each have their own interpretations of acceptable practice. In fact, research demonstrates that it is difficult for faculty administrators to reach consensus on what constitutes plagiarism (Bennett, Behrendt, & Boothby, 2011;Marzluf, 2013;Pecorari & Shaw, 2012;Schwabl, Rossiter, & Abbott, 2013).
In short, the issue that I have identified is that university policies on academic integrity are typically applied via a fairly high level of administration, even in cases where the root of the problem is one of learning rather than intentional deception (which, therefore, results in what we tend to call 'unintentional' plagiarism). I argue that it would be both more efficient and more effective to deal with cases of unintentional plagiarism through the role of the classroom instructor rather than

The Aim of the Present Analysis
In this present paper, I aim to analyze the issue of unintentional plagiarism through the lenses of two social theories. The first is Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural theory of learning. The second is Foucault's (1969) archaeology of knowledge. Each of these theories have contributed to my understanding of the dynamics at play within the learning processes related to secondary source use.
These theories have also led me to recognize the importance of composition theory to the construction of policies concerning plagiarism. In particular, Flower and Hayes' (1981) cognitive process theory of writing relies on Vygotsky's (1978) ideas and frames writing as a process that is iterative and recursive rather than as a linear process of discrete stages. In the sections that follow, I will outline each theoretical perspective, the key concepts of each, and then apply a unified theoretical framework to the issue of 'unintentional plagiarism.'

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Learning
Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural theory of learning is familiar to primary and secondary school teachers who have been trained within the Western tradition of education (Dimitriadis & Kamberelis, 2006), but formal training in pedagogy is not generally required for higher education instructors (Robinson & Hope, 2013). In other words, faculty members do not necessarily have a robust understanding of the cognitive processes involved in learning nor the teaching and learning strategies that might capitalize upon these processes. Verenikina (2003) described Vygotsky's life work as culminating in a sociocultural theory of cognition. She identifies the concept of "mediation" as being the most central to his theory and describes it as the way in which "consciousness is constructed through a subject's interactions with the world" (p. 4). John-Steiner and Mahn (1996) outlined three main components of Vygotsky's theory: (a) "social sources of development"; (b) "semiotic mediation"; and, (c) "genetic analysis." They further elaborate these components through