“Pendidikan karakter mendesak” (Character-building education is desperately needed) reads the headline of a national newspaper. Such calls have been prompted by recent violations plaguing academic circles nationwide.
With character-building included as a mandatory subject in the national curriculum, it is believed that students will begin to see the importance of preserving academic honesty.
It is my contention that these protracted problems in our academic circles, such as students stealing or copying others’ material without permission, cannot be resolved with a purely educational perspective.
That is to say the inclusion of character-building in the national curriculum is unlikely to bring about efficacious results.
There are at least two good reasons for this assumption. First, our academia is very much oriented toward a Western concept of academic honesty, which often stereotypes non-Western students as lacking originality and creativity.
Second, seeking a solution via educational practice cannot address the broader picture of students’
literacy proficiency.
For the above reasons, seeking to remedy these violations with purely educational means cannot be effective. Instead, we need a fresh perspective.
That is, we need to fathom our students by virtue of their rhetorical tradition, which has, in fact, been part of their academic practices for so long. It is through this orientation we can counterclaim the prevailing stereotypes against non-Western students.
In an orally-dominant culture, firmly rooted in a Javanese outlook sabda pendita ratu (the words of a priestly king), knowledge is not treated as an accumulation of one’s individual voices, but instead an accumulation of voices of those having authority. Knowledge is viewed as an entity to be respected and admired rather than an entity to be contested or disputed.
To some extent, our rhetorical tradition has much in common with that of Tamil and Chinese traditions. In his ground-breaking research, Suresh Canagarajah, a native Sri-Lankan of the Tamil community, found that the originality of both Chinese and Tamil rhetorical traditions lies in constructing one’s voice through the words of others. Such a practice, he argues, does not necessarily suppress one’s ethos.
Thus, unlike Western academic traditions that encourage students to voice and display knowledge independent of external pressures, our cultural wisdom exhorts students to respect established knowledge voiced primarily by those having authority.
This cultural practice to a great extent affects the literacy practice of our students. Restricted by cultural practices, students may be unwilling or feel diffident about expressing things, and hence constructing knowledge from their own perspectives.
They fear that displaying knowledge in a written form via their individual voice will be alleged to deviate from the norm.
The long tradition of respecting (rather than contesting) dominant knowledge paradigms has made students depend upon the words of others in the process of knowledge construction.
Observing students’ written work in academic circles, one can see an excessive borrowing of words from authors students think have authority over topics they write about. In this respect, knowledge is constructed via excessive borrowing of others’ words.
By orienting and situating the current academic practice to wider rhetorical and cultural perspectives of students, teachers can gain valuable insights into how they should treat students’ writing in constructive rather than judgmental ways.
With this orientation, excessive borrowing of others’ words can be seen as part of non-Western students’ writing strategies to achieve their rhetorical purposes.
This practice, however, should not be construed as legitimizing academic dishonesty, such as plagiarism. On a more positive note, it should be viewed as a reflection of students’ rhetorical tradition in the process of knowledge construction via written media.
Observing students’ written work in academic circles, one can see an excessive borrowing of words from authors.
The writer is associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He is the chief editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.
