How One English Professor Plans to Turn Melania Trump Into a Teachable Moment

he Republican National Convention is doing more than just informing voters. It’s educating them on the perils of plagiarism.
On Monday night, Melania Trump, the wife of the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, delivered a speech that appeared to plagiarize parts of a speech Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Some academics saw this as an opportunity to debate different definitions of plagiarism. One adjunct professor of English plans to put Ms. Trump in her syllabus for the fall semester.
Terri Coleman, a professor at Dillard University, a historically black institution in New Orleans, says she will use Ms. Trump’s speech as an example to teach her students about plagiarism. She spoke to The Chronicle on Tuesday about how she plans to turn the speech into a teachable moment. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. On Twitter you said that you were planning to use Melania Trump’s speech to teach students. How so?

A. I teach at an HBCU, all black students. Most of my students are from New Orleans, so any way that I can make the boring [expletive] of writing even remotely accessible to them, I will do it. I do a lot memes and listicles, and my marginal notes are a lot of times in hashtag form.

What I’m thinking with plagiarism is we always have a big thing in our discussion of academic integrity. Throughout the semester, when we’re looking to do research papers and include sources, we talk about the different ways you can take information from someone else and [make] citations.
Usually what I’ve done with that is talk about three different ways to do it, and we’ll take a quote and be like, "OK, how do we cite it if we take an exact quote in quotation marks? How do we cite it if we are just using the idea? How do we reference it if we’re talking about it?"

For Melania, I think she’ll be fun, because I also follow a lot of my former students on Twitter, and they’re already in on the joke. So I know it will land with my student population, but I’m just going to play that section of the speech, play that section of Michelle Obama’s speech, give them transcripts, and talk about, "Look, I know she didn’t say the exact same thing, but, real talk, we know she stole these ideas. This is not cool."

And that sets me up for the rest of the semester, instead having to have an actual conversation when my students — and I know they will — plagiarize random stuff when they are writing response papers. I can just circle it and say #MelaniaTrumpQuotes instead of actually having to explain [expletive] again.