Eliciting Emotional Engagement in Academic Integrity Instruction

The Library team and the Student Learning (SL) team provide complementary literacy services to University of Waikato (UOW) students; the Librarians work with students to develop information literacy, and the SL team their academic literacy. When it comes to Academic Integrity (AI) and intertextual practices, there are obvious overlaps. A significant proportion of this work for both teams is providing AI education, but both teams face constraints for delivery, resulting occasionally in students not gaining this knowledge in a timely way, and possibly suffering emotionally confronting consequences for their ignorance. In part, the responsibility for students’ discomfiture lies with the institution, and so in the past few years there has been a concerted effort to provide timely, safe and accessible AI learning opportunities. The authors of the Academic Integrity modules at the UOW were determined to move away from the usual and ubiquitous transmissive models, suspecting that the prevailing information-dense and rule-based content was part of a systemic failure generally of tertiary institutions to provide adequate and accessible AI instruction in a meaningful and transformative way. At the UOW, we instead developed an interactive visual narrative approach presented in a comic-strip format centered around the experiences of three fictitious students and their classmates studying courses at the UOW. The AI course invites students to reflect personally on the stories; the purpose of which is to create emotional engagement, and evoke in them a sense of belonging, and of solidarity in defense of stated UOW AI expectations. This chapter provides pedagogical justification for this original approach, summarizes the content of the modules, and identifies the interactive strategies that engage students emotionally. It then appraises some voluntarily provided student feedback to speculate on the effectiveness of the course. Both the SL and the UOW Library Teaching and Learning teams anticipate further collaborations to continue to meet student AI literacy needs. Dedication: Remembering fondly Dr. Dean Ballinger.