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Citation is fundamental in successfully constructing academic discourse. There has been much discussion concerning the considerable difficulties tertiary students experience when writing using sources, especially for those who speak English as an Additional Language. This paper interrogates the predominantly negative discourses that surround plagiarism, involving notions of honesty, integrity, punishment, trust, and deceit. These negative discourses tend to perpetuate hierarchical and impenetrable spaces in higher education. Drawing on our experiences in South African writing centres, and using key concepts from academic literacies, this paper explores ways of addressing plagiarism that can serve to empower students, including developing academic voice through citation, acknowledging “mimicry” as part of writing development, and developing critical thinking.

This paper focuses on the affordances of multimodal pedagogies in writing centre environments to improve student writing. Writing centres have the potential to function as change agents, contributing towards changing the dominant attitudes to language and texts. Multimodal pedagogies encourage the use of a range of modes (such as talk, writing, music and images) and a range of resources (including multilingual, experiential, embodied and technology-enriched resources). This paper explores how consultants and students use a range of modes and ensembles of modes to develop thinking and learning in a multilingual and diverse higher education context. The dual role of consultants, being both ‘reproducers’ and ‘interrogators’ of academic discourse, is touched upon, and the importance of ‘recognising’ and drawing on the ‘brought-along’ resources in the training of consultants is highlighted. The unique nature of one-on-one consultations in the tertiary environment is explored, as well as the ways in which this pedagogical space can be enhanced through the use of multimodal pedagogies. To this end, the paper examines talk as an important mode in improving writing. It also interrogates working on the screen versus the page, the affordances of mind mapping, and the balancing of creativity and constraints in the writing consultation. The aim is to theorise a multimodal approach to improving student writing through the examination of practice. The contention is that multimodal pedagogies can acknowledge consultants and students as agentive, resourceful and creative meaning-makers. This is particularly relevant in a context in which autonomous and decontextualised models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as ‘lacking’ in resources.