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Student attitudes toward intellectual property.

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Abstract

This article discusses the tensions that exist for students in writing classrooms between collaborative workshopping of papers and individual notions of intellectual property ownership. In order to adjust to students' confusion, this article suggests that teachers give more graded weight to metawritings, in which students discuss their writing processes and those who contributed to them, rather that putting sole focus on the writings themselves. By focusing students' energies and anxieties on the processes by which they create writing, teachers can better address issues of intellectual property in the classroom.

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Candace Spigelman, in her book Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups, notes that students in writing classes often express trepidation over sharing their work with other students, often going so far as to skip class on workshop days or refusing to discard rough drafts in the computer lab for fear that peers might appropriate their ideas (126). In her observations of four students who worked together as a workshopping group in her writing class, the tensions between individual work and collaborative processes became even clearer. For example, when reviewing videotapes of their workshop sessions, the four students spoke about their responses in corporate terms, using the pronoun "we," as in "'We weren't sure if we should put a question mark'" (qtd. in Spigelman 86-87). Yet when interviewing the author about his group's responses to his paper, he minimized their role, stating that the writing group was just helping him make decisions about his work; the author felt that despite the group's input, he still retained sole authorship over the text (89-90).

However, would the above author have been writing his own paper had he used wording supplied to...