10/26/2026

Reflections on IDoA 2026 Recipes for Integrity: Sharing your signature dish

by Mary Davis

The International Day of Action for Academic Integrity (IDoA 2026) took place on October 21. With our theme of Recipes for Integrity, I think we may have hit our most successful, relatable metaphor and means of engaging and having fun with students in many different cultural contexts. Thanks go particularly to Thomas Lancaster for finally convincing the IDoA Planning Committee to go with integrity in the kitchen as our theme! Special thanks to my co-chair Rachel Gorjup for coming up with the IDoA 2026 map so that we could actually see the engagement with IDoA visually across the world. I had not realised the extent to which we could get people in institutions around the world to paint aprons, wear chefs' hats and get cooking!

As the IDoA host for the whole 15 hour event, I am delighted that we achieved so much engagement with 98 panelists and 385 attendees across the day, so almost 500 people were active in academic integrity in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Nigeria, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan, India, China, Greece, Canada, UAE, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Czechia and North Macedonia.

Another aspect I am especially proud of this year is the prominence of students in the day. 54 out of our 98 presenters were students, featured in 11 out of our 15 main sessions. IDoA was driven by students who developed or co-developed teaching resources and activities, created videos, moderated student panels, debated integrity approaches, discussed their roles as ambassadors and leaders, and presented their research. Furthermore, one of our most outstanding records was in the number of submissions to our student recipe for integrity contest this year: 834!! It is truly fantastic to see the efforts and creativity in these submissions: well done to all the students who participated! We’re working through these and will announce prize winners in due course.

I am so grateful to all presenters for the energy, enthusiasm and dedication they put into every session to make IDoA a really memorable event. They helped to create interest, engagement and fun in academic integrity across the world with the wonderful ways they engaged with our recipes for integrity theme: in kitchens, with chefs' hats, food items and sayings, menus, special meals, aprons, utensils, cookbooks, methods, ingredients and signature dishes. I’m going to try to give a flavour of each session in my reflections and images below.

 

Session 1 Masterchef of Integrity

We started the day with an amazing episode of Integrity Chef (based on Masterchef) developed by the very creative Australia/New Zealand IDoA working group. It featured three contestants making their own lasagne with different methods demonstrating fundamental values of academic integrity, including a cooking disaster where honesty led to a second chance. As the host, Martin McMorrow so aptly put it: ‘Let’s agree to put the pasta behind us!’

The second part of the first session featured a student panel from Melbourne Institute of Technology. The panel talked about their experiences of engaging other students in IDoA by walking around wearing chefs’ hats and explained something that resonated across the day: ‘cooking is a great way to explain integrity’.

 

 

Session 2 Be our dinner guests!

Our second session was presented by students from Gaza who demonstrated three traditional Palestinian dishes: Maqlubeh, Musakhan and Knafeh Nabulsiyeh.

As they described each meal, they conveyed their special values of belonging, truth, bringing people together, and included some magic cooking with turning dishes upside down or flipping them, and even getting in the Guiness Book of Records for 74 metres of Nabulsiyeh dessert (above)! Ruba Khalid Al-Faleet ended the session by reading her moving poem ‘A recipe for the children we were’. This session was organised by Martin McMorrow as a teacher for the British Council ‘Resilient Voices’ project in Gaza.

 

Session 3 Recipes for Integrity Community Experts (the RICE panel)

This session was led by students from Adelaide University, Australia. A video created by student James Maletto featured a restaurant scenario to demonstrate integrity problems in kitchens. After the video, James consulted with Recipes for Integrity Community of Experts (RICE) panel (all in chefs' hats!) who explained integrity points related to contract cheating, plagiarism, collusion, falsification and unethical practice using the restaurant examples.

The next part of the session included a fortune cookies activity with food sayings adapted to integrity. We invited attendees to contribute to our list of food sayings for integrity which generated a lot of engagement: we got some wonderful contributions from many countries. This resource is now freely available to use.

 

Session 4 Upholding integrity in Pakistan and KSA

The fourth session marked the first collaboration between ICAI and the new AMEA-ACARI (Asia, Middle East and Africa Consortium for Academic and Research Integrity). The panel included Prof.Dr Shahid Soroya who established Pakistan’s National Centre for Integrity. The presenters from Pakistan and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia talked about the importance of collaboration and developing trust across education, establishing leadership roles with consistency in policy and shared responsibility to embed academic integrity into education. One memorable message was: ‘Education is all about the transmission of enthusiasm’.

 

 

Session 5 Academic Integrity Taskforce in high school

The fifth session took us to Kodaikanal Independent School in Tamil Nadu, India. Five high school students, together with the Principal and Head Librarian explained how they had established a student-led academic integrity taskforce to decide how to approach academic integrity and conduct breaches. They reported how they first debated approaches of justice and mercy, and agreed on restorative justice as a way forward. Their pioneering work together is leading to a Student Council system within their school. What was particularly impressive was how much the students cared about fairness for all with integrity, and saw it clearly as building skills for life.  

 

Session 6 AI assessment menu

For session 6, Professor Danny Liu from University of Sydney had a lot to say about menus! He explained the benefit of providing an assessment menu of different courses to guide students in ethical use of AI. He argued that other methods of guiding students increase anxiety while an assessment menu can provide responsible ways of using AI, and students can be encouraged to adopt healthy choices.

 

Unfortunately for me, my internet crashed at this point so I didn’t see the whole session. Luckily, recordings will be available soon on our IDoA webpage.

 

Session 7 Ethos and Filotimo in action

In this session, ten students from the American College of Greece at Deree elaborated on the Greek terms of ethos and filotimo (honour/respect) in terms of recipes for integrity. They demonstrated how cooking can convey integrity lessons, such as an example of putting too much salt in a dish where they learned from this lesson and never forgot after that unpleasant experience, so it was a powerful way of learning from mistakes.

They talked about the discomfort of growth, making a dish of your own, and assessment magic where you become a different person from learning to do something new. What an inspiring way to view the value of assessment! Thanks to Alex Jeikner and Marilena Antoniadou for organising this session.

 

Session 8 Postplagiarism: A recipe for academic integrity

Professor Sarah Elaine Eaton chaired our eighth session with 6 current or recent doctoral students working in the Postplagiarism Lab at University of Calgary, Canada. Using the lens and tenets of postplagiarism, each panelist presented some recipes with methods and ingredients for integrity. This session was very interactive and awareness-raising, as they asked though-provoking questions about attendees’ practices and perspectives throughout the session (see image).

 

Session 9 Student voices on the Dubai accord

In this session, Zeenath Reza Khan from University of Wollongong in Dubai brought together 2 undergraduate and 2 high school students to discuss the newly established Dubai Accord for Academic Integrity.

They discussed the importance of genuine human contributions to all study and work, that the goal of education should be learning, what is a fair approach, that they should avoid ready meals as the easy way out, consider student rights and responsibilities and interestingly stated: ‘Thinking takes a backseat if AI is doing the work’.

 

Session 10 ‘Is maith an t-anlann an t-ocras’ Hunger is best sauce

This session was hosted by Justin Tonra from the National Academic Integrity Network, with contributors from Quality and Qualifications Institute (QQI) and Higher Education Institutions. They explained the Irish saying that if you embrace hunger, a meal tastes better later, and so the integrity message is about making a strong effort for learning. We benefitted from a lot of Irish wisdom in this session. The presenters talked about the need to model academic integrity to students. As so clearly expressed by Lynne Keery in the session: ‘if you show students the importance of academic integrity for their life, you’ve cracked the whole problem’. However, at one point, Justin made the mistake of saying ‘academic integrity is not the sexiest topic’ but the partisan audience rejected this entirely and he backed down!

 

Session 11 Integrity kitchens around the world in the age of GenAI

This culturally inspired session brought together members of the European Network for Academic Integrity. They each presented how kitchen utensils could be used to present integrity messages: Turkish teapots, Georgian wooden spoons, Ukrainian scales, Latvian cookbooks, and British sieves and baby implements.

They agreed that university can be seen as a kind of kitchen and place for learning. Özgür’s presentation of integrit-tea was particularly compelling and memorable. Watch out for further blogs from this group as they continue exploring the theme of integrity kitchen!

 

Session 12 Recipes for Integrity: Creating your signature dish

The IDoA Student Working Group led by Stephen Bunbury presented their impressive resources, with an interactive recipe book and Cahoot activity which really engaged the audience in decision making about academic integrity. The presentation of resources was led by the student creator, Urwah. The resources were ambitious and impressive, and testament to a lot of effort especially by Urwah in the team. Well done to the IDoA Student Working Group!

 

Session 13 Recetas de integridad desde la cocina de los estudiantes de América Latina’ Recipes for integrity from the kitchen of students from Latin America

This panel in Spanish was chaired by a student with fellow student participants from Mexico, Guatemala and Chile discussing their recipes for integrity. Each student had a wonderful traditional Latin American kitchen background which set the scene visually.

The students had an interesting debate around some difficult questions about ethical use of AI, and they all recognized that their own decisions can affect others. Thank you to Jorge Luis Zatarain and Luz Godina for organising this session, and to student Carlos for leading it so effectively.

 

Session 14 Opposite of Siloing: Cooking up campus collaborations that work

This session brought together Professor David Rettinger from University of Tulsa, USA with ICAI colleague Dr Greer Murphy, a colleague and student from UCSC. They discussed how to make working together a success by trusting others and getting help from those who have the skills we need.

An example of this was given by Zoe, the student presenter, who said they had unique knowledge about what it is like to be a student right now; clearly to make a student initiative successful, this current knowledge is needed. Apart from recipes, this session brought in some wonderful metaphors of how a university is hard to change, like turning around a cargo boat, that sometimes integrity initiatives need to be in place before they are ready, like flying a plane while still building it, about having success such as in some sport moves (I got lost there), and imagining future changes with a magic wand – an excellent optimistic note to end on.

 

Session 15 A signature dish approach to doctoral integrity

The final session featured three recent doctoral graduates who had researched academic integrity topics in the US, Canada and UK. They discussed their research and key findings and then their individual challenges on the doctoral journey. They talked about the usefulness of a social justice lens for inclusion in academic integrity, the difficulty of making your work fully your own when using a vast amount of literature, and of the pressure both to do everything in depth to become an expert, but also finish within a specific time frame.

 

Closing off 2026

In addition to the 15 sessions above, we had 5 short sessions in the day: my overview to start, check-ins of the IDoA map by Rachel Gorjup, an introduction to our IDoA resources by Hannah Gifford, a promotion for the ICAI Conference 2027 by the 3 co-chairs Luz Godina, Liliana Almaguer and Camilla Roberts, and our final round up at the end of the day. Here’s Rachel’s presentation of our interactive IDoA 2026 map.

We reflected on the goodwill and engagement across the day, and returned to the message from a student contributor in the first session: cooking is a great way to talk about integrity!

In Rachel’s words, I can ‘hang up my apron now’ from IDoA. But look out for more IDoA-themed blogs in the coming weeks and the announcement about winners of our student contest with 834 entries this year!!

Access our resources and video recordings via the IDoA 2026 webpage.

 

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Professor Mary Davis is IDoA Co-chair, ICAI Vice President (Communications) and Academic Integrity Lead at Oxford Brookes University, UK

 

The authors' views are their own.

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