Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity

Department: Film and Media Studies

Date and Time: March 1, 2018 | 11:30 AM-1:30 PM

Event Location: HG 1010

Event Details


Open to Visual Studies faculty and graduate students only

Please join us on for a special workshop with Professor Gerald Nelms on

"Plagiarism as Educational Opportunity"

Lunch will be served,
so RSVP to Beth Pace at epace@uci.edu by February 27!
(with support from the Campus Writing Center)

Gerald “Jerry” Nelms (PhD, Ohio State, 1990; MFA, UNC-Greensboro, 1981) is currently the Academic Director for Developmental Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Wright State University. From 2010 through 2012, he was a visiting instructional consultant at the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Ohio State, and for twenty years before that, he was a faculty member and administrator at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Director of Communication Across the Curriculum; Department Chair; and Undergraduate Studies Director in English).

According to Professor Nelms,

"Treating student plagiarism as an opportunity for teaching and learning is a research- and evidence-based approach that breaks with the traditional view of plagiarism as an obstruction to education. This newer approach embraces conclusions of and reasoned inferences from decades of interdisciplinary research and scholarship on the plagiaristic behaviors of high school and college students and on teaching and learning research and scholarship more generally. In this workshop, participants will confront real-life and hypothetical scenarios intended to complicate our thinking about student plagiarism and how we view our students. Participants will also learn about the consensus understanding of plagiarism scholars, who recognize that student plagiarism can be the result of unintentional, inadvertent error and cultural misunderstandings (and our failure to adequately address those misunderstandings) as well as underlying mindsets and motivations that lead to intentional plagiaristic behavior. Participants will also learn how plagiarism functions developmentally as the “outsider” makes moves to become an “insider.” Participants will also learn about the workshop facilitator’s Plagiarism Response Heuristic and Guide. The workshop is intended to be highly interactive, allowing for discussions and questions, eliciting various perspectives on the issues addressed."