"It's Not Cheating if You Don't Get Caught": Critical Discourse Analysis of Academic Integrity Policies in Public High Schools
Open AccessThe purpose of this study was to present a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of current academic integrity policies used by public high schools, to uncover how they impede the fostering of the ethic of care and a sense of community in the school. Ten public high schools from ten different states, all of which are members of the School for Ethical Education's Academic Integrity Network, were selected for this study. The academic integrity policies for each of these ten schools were first analyzed through a traditional text analysis approach, which revealed four key themes throughout the documents--academic dishonesty as discipline, student as criminal, authoritative adult voice, and extreme punishment. Then, the four themes of the overall discourse were analyzed by using a critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology, to uncover the impossibilities of fostering the ethic of care and a sense of community around the concept of academic integrity. The theoretical perspective for this study was postmodernism. This study is grounded in the work of Foucault, who calls into question the extreme need for order and strict discipline, and instead argues for a more gentle way to punish. Foucault also calls into question the abuse of power by those in authority, and the inequalities of traditional power hierarchies in social institutions. This study sought to uncover within the academic integrity policies the various constructs which Foucault describes.The findings of the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the academic integrity policies in this study reveal constructs which create the impossibility of fostering the ethic of care or creating a sense of community in schools. These constructs include a lack of a definition of "academic integrity," or a definition for "academic integrity" focused on negative concepts such as dishonesty or cheating; teacher as arbiter in determining the meaning of "academic integrity"; a student voice that is either silenced or controlled, and which fails to engage the reality of why students cheat; honor councils which simply function by legitimating hegemony; and teacher as victim of an academic crime committed by students, thereby criminalizing the concept of academic integrity.
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