Few things in life irk me. It's a nice skill to have, especially when negotiating the stresses of a Phd program. Yet some times an annoyance will not go away. Simply because it may be too important for an instant dismissal. The discussions of synthesis I have with teachers are one of these moments.
Too often I hear, "Synthesis, that has to do with citations right?" or I am questioned as soon as we discuss synthesis about how to get children to cite their sources. This immediate reaction annoys me. Its not that giving someone credit for their work isn't important, but when did we allow the construct of synthesis, a complex process, to be simply defined by where a comma goes in MLA format?
Bloom put synthesis high up in the taxonomy, just below evaluation and noted that it involves the production of unique communications, production of a plan, and/or derivation of abstract relations. Krathwohl in his revision of Bloom's taxonomy renamed synthesis "create" and placed it at the top of his taxonomy, as the most complex cognitive process. Krathwohl defined the process as "putting elements together to form a novel, coherent whole or make an original product." There seems to be a lot more involved in synthesis than a simple in-text citation.
Yet where ever I speak there is someone in the audience who equates synthesis with citations. Teachers rant about a barrage of copy paste writings that students pass off. I contend that while some cases of deliberate plagiarism do exist most of the instances are not caused by questionable ethics but result from questionable pedagogy that have failed to prepare students for reading and writing in a digital landscape.
You ever watch a student as they conduct research for homework or enjoyment? Students encounter unlimited choices and have to combine multiple texts with each being an amalgamation of text, videos, and sound. They have to then combine what they read with what they already know. Students may make intertextual links to other literary events in there life. This meaning construction is then often further complicated by contextual influences as "truth" is often negotiated with peers, teachers, and community. Then as students begin to create a message to share the knowledge they constructed they most often choose what is important...too often they get lost because schools do not prepare readers for the 21st century.
In most classes there is one authoritative source. The textbook. Students do not have to judge the information they read. Instead they need to retain it for recall items on tests. Learners do not need to combine information from multiple nonlinear readings, in many classes there is just one linear source.
So do not be surprised, or quick to judge when students struggle with the synthesis of multiple online sources. They were never taught the new literacies of online reading comprehension. Do not be overly punitive with moments of plagiarism as in the case of Mark Gruntz of California Baptist University and Allison Routman of Ohio University who, according to the Washington Post, were left stranded in a foreign country somewhere in the Mediterranean, and riddled with debt after losing credit for their summer courses.
Did the students violate an underage drinking ban? No that does not result in a immediate expulsion. Did they get into a physical altercation? Again, no. The crime these two students committed for which they were jettisoned from the boat and marooned in a foreign country was simply not citing Wikipedia enough. Seriously, that is all they did. They cited the source without proper quotes and they were left alone, halfway across the globe and in over $10,000 of debt.
Granted the teacher involved did spend one day teaching students about plagiarism, but that could never make up for a K-12 education that does not prepare students for a digital age. Maybe instead of kicking students out of school we should spend more time trying to teach students to overcome the challenges of synthesizing in an online world.
Greg
