Minding the Gap: Fostering Academic Integrity in our Classrooms

Series: CTLT Institute

Event Date & Time

  • December 5, 2018
    11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Event Description

Academic integrity is a core expectation of how we conduct ourselves in the scholarly community. But, beyond warnings to not commit academic misconduct, 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. How can we make space in our courses to address this essential and complex topic in ways that help students understand why academic integrity matters, and not focus only on policies and consequences for misconduct? What do students need to know to help them put this concept into practice when it comes to their own work in their different courses and disciplines?

This session will share preliminary findings, road-tested activities, and learning opportunities from our active TLEF research project, “Our Cheating Hearts? Changing the Conversation through Academic Integrity Curriculum in First-Year Arts Programs.” This project has helped instructors develop and integrate explicit instruction on academic integrity that fosters understanding of the production of ethical scholarship as inseparable from one’s role in a scholarly community (e.g., Blum 2009; Nelms 2015). Focusing on pedagogical interventions into student learning of academic integrity that address clear gaps in understanding, we have created sustainable and flexible resources to better introduce students to the ethical production of knowledge and equip them to participate in that enterprise.

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 of this core concept. Participants will leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of the academic integrity skills and concepts that students find most challenging, and new activities, strategies, and models for teaching this topic.

FACILITATORS:

  • Laurie McNeill, Senior Instructor, English; Chair, First-Year Programs
  • Kristi Carey, Project Coordinator, First Year Arts
  • Nazih El-Bezre, Lecturer, Arts Studies in Research and Writing
  • Brianne Orr-Alvarez, Lecturer, French, Hispanics and Italian Studies
  • Moberley Luger, Lecturer, English
  • Laila Ferreira,Lecturer, Arts Studies in Research and Writing