Teaching and Learning a Joyful Citation Praxis: Affective Relations for Fostering Community Through Our Compositions

Abstract

Many of us learned to cite sources to avoid plagiarism or to give credit. Yet there are many more generative reasons to teach and learn citation. This essay offers a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective on our personal journeys toward viewing and practicing citation as a way of joyfully generating community with others. We describe our individual struggles, how anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and critical feminist scholars have shaped our thinking, and what we do within the classroom to practice a joyful, generative way of citing. We offer suggestions for how to hold ourselves and students accountable to more inclusive and community-oriented ways of citing by infusing reflective practice throughout the semester in college writing-intensive courses.