Cultivating Students’ Understanding of Academic Integrity in our Online and Face-To-Face Courses – August 17, 2020

Event Date & Time

Event Description

Please click “Register Now” to register for this event. This event will hosted online on Zoom.

Academic integrity is a core expectation of how we conduct ourselves in the scholarly community. But, beyond warnings to not commit academic misconduct (building on a default deficiency model that assumes students – or, at least, some students—will cheat), we don’t typically address this topic with our students, the newest members of this community. This gap between implicit expectation and explicit instruction can cause serious challenges for students, who don’t necessarily know why we care so much about academic integrity, or how to apply this concept when it comes to doing their own work. We risk causing institutional harm by punishing students for knowledge they don’t have (Kier 2014), not only about academic integrity but also about the university and its practices. We therefore have opportunities to design our courses in ways that, instead, make academic integrity an explicit and attainable part of our teaching and learning. Such course design builds on questions such as these: How do we invite students to work with academic integrity in our online and face-to-face courses and support them in that work? How can we foster students’ understanding of not only what academic integrity means, but why it matters, without focusing on policies and consequences for misconduct? How can we help our students put this concept into practice in their different courses and contexts, including online?

This session shares the findings of a three-year project in first-year writing courses that has investigated new ways to cultivate academic integrity and illustrates how these findings can shape course design that cultivates academic integrity. We will ask participants to reflect on their own teaching practices as part of a wider discussion of how we teach academic integrity, and identify opportunities in those practices to better support student learning and application of this core concept. In this session, you will learn strategies for embedding instruction on and expectations about ethical knowledge production in your course in ways that help students understand what academic integrity means, why it matters, and how they can meet those expectations.

Facilitators:

• Laurie McNeill, Director, Arts First-Year & Interdisciplinary Programs, & Chair, Arts Studies in Research & Writing Senior Instructor, Department of English Language and Literatures and School of Journalism, Writing, and Media
• Judy Chan, Faculty Associate / Faculty Liaison Land and Food Systems (CTLT)

Please ensure you have your own quiet space, a computer with a webcam and headphones or earbuds.