PLAGIARISM AND INTERNET RESEARCH: FROM TEXTBOOK CONTENT TO PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' PERCEPTIONS
Keywords: Plagiarism. Search on the Internet. Textbook. Public education.
Abstract
The explosion of information and communication technologies has intensified and exposed the problems related to plagiarism, cyberplagiarism and undue copying of content in intellectual works, but the knowledge of the genesis of intellectual dishonesty still perseveres. This study investigates how high school textbooks, used by teachers and students in public schools throughout Brazil, deal with plagiarism; the approach to the theme of plagiarism in the normative edict to produce textbooks and in the political pedagogical projects of high schools; and the understanding of students of this educational stage in the Federal District about plagiarism. The theoretical framework on plagiarism and cyberplagiarism is engendered in Krokocz (2012); Diniz and Terra (2014); Ebardo (2018); Comas Forgas and Sureda Negre (2007); Díaz Arce (2017); Gallent Torres and Tello Fons (2021). The methodology is anchored in thematic-categorical Content Analysis, according to Bardin's (2011) guidelines. The state of knowledge on the topic indicates that the problem persists nationally and internationally. The silence of the National Program of the Book and the Didactic Material, the normative edict of production of didactics, the pedagogical political projects and the teachers about plagiarism results in permissiveness of the culture of copy and, consequently, plagiarism, creating a kind of morphic resonance that, in more advanced stages of the academic process and with the scientific-technological advances, results in cyberplagiarism. This isolated treatment, more emphatic from graduation on, disregards the history, the cause and the procedural predecessors in research and writing, and this may be among the permissive elements of the reproduction of intellectual dishonesty. Therefore, students lack pluricultural, multi-literate and multi-semiotic education in plagiarism and in the appropriation of the information made available on the infovia. If two of the most important mediators responsible for teaching (textbooks and schools) relegate plagiarism to a secondary level, then the boundaries of righteousness and ethics are blurred and students may experience cognitive impairment when they appropriate knowledge from the internet, running the risk of being relegated to an uncritical mass. Even though they are aware of what plagiarism is, students are unable to identify specific situations that configure it. The teacher plays a fundamentally important role in the ethical and moral training process of students, and non-compliance with plagiarism results in damage to authorial construction, as the silencing of books and schools can disguise copying and pasting on the internet as banal and harmless and is socio-educational imperative to strengthen the ties between appropriation of knowledge and ethics.
Keywords: Plagiarism. Search on the Internet. Textbook. Public education.