Blog Post #3 (Darius Stewart)

Last semester I had a non-native English-speaking student from Nigeria. She had moved here as an adolescent but still retained much of the linguistic and cultural vestiges of her home country. She became a nationalized citizen only a few months ago. In class, this student would make vey insightful comments that demonstrated a close interaction with the texts. However, her essays did not transfer these same qualities. They were meandering and disorganized, often vague or otherwise incomprehensible. I asked her to explain to me the significant difference in the quality of her responses to the texts in class versus the composition of her essays. She said that she felt essays were required to “sound” highly intelligent, as opposed to exhibiting the more relaxed, reflective thinking that contributed to her in-class discussions. However, because of this, not only did she commit the above-mentioned flaws, but on one of her essays, she plagiarized as well.  She thought it was ok to substitute a word here and there from passages that she felt she couldn’t articulate well herself, and that her “substitutions” somehow made someone else’s ideas her own. I don’t think she intentionally set out to take credit from another person’s work, but, according to her, in writing her essays this way she was trying to make her parents proud of her. Moreover, though her parents were college-educated themselves, she was the first to attend college in the U.S., and her parents had certain expectations for her success. In the case study in “Crossing Cultures,” the Chinese student, Lin, discusses similar expectations to “make good grades,” which corresponds to my student believing that her essays must sound highly intelligent to meet the approval of the instructor and by extension, her parents. My student was also keenly aware of how closely related she was to the African American experience in the U.S. She felt doubly challenged to overperform because of her “international” status as well as her proximity to what African Americans face in higher education as well as the culture at large. After explaining to her why her essays were flawed, she seemed to understand, and (I hope) to trust that she already possessed a level of high order thinking that needn’t be undermined by intellectually overextending herself. 

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