Browsing by Author "Buchenot, Andre"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Adapting Writing Center Pedagogy for Composition Classrooms: A Metacognitive Approach
    (2012-05-04) Gellin, Laura M.; Fox, Stephen L.; Buchenot, Andre; Hogue, Teresa Molinder
    While a writing center tutor may view her role as a coach, a commentator, and a counselor, the tutor actually serves as scaffolding, a temporary, supportive replacement of the processes more experienced writers can manage alone without a tutor, namely, the metacognitive processes of self-assessing, self-monitoring, and self-motivating. Metacognition then becomes the essential factor in adapting writing center practices into the composition classroom. By re-conceptualizing the three roles of a writing center tutor and re-visioning the classroom into a more “pure” learning space, tutor-teachers improve students’ writing skills, increase their engagement, and redirect students’ focus toward the writing process rather than the grade. To demonstrate the efficacy of this adapted writing center approach in the composition classroom, I created an authentic, challenging project in which the pre-project activities, task design, work process, and reflection assignment enact my proposed theory. By adopting this approach, tutor-teachers ultimately empower students and design compositional tasks that act as a catalyst for transforming the way students understand themselves as writers and as students.
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    Best Practices in the Multidialectal High School English Class: Implementing Code-switching and Code-meshing
    (2022-01) Johnson, Alicia M.; Fox, Stephen; Lovejoy, Kim Brian; Buchenot, Andre
    Linguists define dialect as a form of a language, and they agree that all dialects are equally legitimate forms of the language. The stratification of dialects, however, is based on social hierarchies and results in some dialects being privileged and others carrying stigma. The bias against nondominant dialects results in language discrimination and limits one’s access to social power. This inequity gives rise to additional obstacles that impede academic success for students who speak a nondominant variety. A significant portion of those obstacles can be addressed with appropriate teacher training and the incorporation of language studies in the secondary English classroom. Language studies will benefit students who speak the dominant dialect by preparing them for interactions with the wide varieties of English they will encounter in the increasingly diverse and global workforce. Students who speak nondominant dialects will be equipped with the tools to navigate and challenge the standard language ideology.
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    "I Knew Grad School Was Gonna Be Hard But...": Community and Feedback in Graduate Writing Support
    (2021-06) Worrell, Brandilyn Nicole; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
    Often, one of the first areas to cave under the pressures of graduate school is a graduate student’s writing. Sometimes this is because a writer feels unprepared for the amount or types of writing or it is simply due to the fact that writing is a layered process that has not been fully explained to graduate students before. In any of these situations, there remains a need for graduate writing support that accounts for these varied experiences and the larger graduate school environment. In order to better understand these needs on the IUPUI campus and begin to address them, this study collected data from current IUPUI graduate students and a pilot Graduate Writing Group program through the University Writing Center. Through this research, two key themes arose as vital to addressing graduate writer needs and student success in graduate school: community and feedback. By encouraging consideration of these topics within graduate writing programming, support offered can encourage these areas for graduate writers. Community provides space for students not only to learn from each other but also share common experiences and struggles. Through these spaces, graduate students can gain insight into their writing, program, field, and themselves by recognizing what is a natural part of the graduate school process, what needs to change, and how they develop as a result. Quality and diverse feedback leads to deeper understanding of a student’s field, their voice, and their writing process. Without an understanding of these two elements of graduate writing, students remain more likely to struggle with the graduate school process and with the liminal space of being students and professionals.
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    Reading the Game: Exploring Narratives in Video Games as Literary Texts
    (2018-12) Turley, Andrew C.; Musgrave, Megan; Buchenot, Andre; Marvin, Thomas
    Video games are increasingly recognized as powerful tools for learning in classrooms. However, they are widely neglected in the field of English, particularly as objects worthy of literary study. This project argues the place of video games as objects of literary study and criticism, combining the theories of Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, and James Paul Gee. The author of this study presents an approach to literary criticism of video games that he names “player-generated narratives.” Through player-generated narratives, players as readers of video games create loci for interpretative strategies that lead to both decoding and critical inspection of game narratives. This project includes a case-study of the video game Undertale taught in multiple college literature classrooms over the course of a year. Results of the study show that a video game introduced as a work of literature to a classroom increases participation, actives disengaged students, and connects literary concepts across media through multimodal learning. The project concludes with a chapter discussing applications of video games as texts in literature classrooms, including addressing the practical concerns of migrating video games into an educational setting.
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    Teaching students how to tailor messages: lessons learned from a technical communication course
    (2016-12-05) Baechle, Mary Frances; Lovejoy, Kim B.; Buchenot, Andre; Renguette, Corinne
    Tailoring messages is the process of customizing messages that are more relevant for the receiver, with the aim of improving the recipient’s engagement with and understanding about information in the message. Little research has been done to look at tailored messages in technical communication about healthcare technology, even though the use of technology in healthcare, and the complexity of that technology, continues to increase. Research was performed to investigate if students who plan to work in the healthcare technology field can demonstrate an understanding about tailoring messages and can tailor messages in their technical communication. A four-phase Action Research Cycle for inquiry into teaching and learning was used to modify course materials and analyze work for six assignments submitted by 14 students enrolled in Technical Communication for the Health Care Professions, TCM 38000, during the 2015 spring semester. Although TCM 38000 has always been open to students in other majors, the majority of students who take the course are in the Health Engineering Technology Management (HETM) program at Purdue’s School of Engineering and Technology on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in Indianapolis. Overall, the modifications made to TCM 38000 were successful in helping students begin to learn about tailoring messages and create messages tailored for a specific end-user in their technical communication developed for some course assignments. In their Reflections for a User Manual assignment, the majority of students explained that they used what they learned through course materials and discussions to reach beyond their learning and come up with techniques for tailoring messages on their own. Students used word choice, information content and role-play techniques to determine the end-user’s information needs and then to tailor messages in their manuals to address those needs. After reflecting on the results of the research, some course materials will be modified so that students can gain a deeper understanding about tailoring messages and can have more opportunities to practice writing tailored messages in course assignments. Research implications expand beyond the classroom into workplace training for organizations that have both technical and non-technical employees that must effectively communicate.
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    Wayward Stories: A Rhetoric of Community in Writing Center Administration
    (2019-07) Hull, Kelin; Brooks-Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andre; Layden, Sarah
    Six weeks in to my position as assistant director of the writing center and suddenly I was confronted by a cluster bombing of issues and concerns – microaggressions, depression, confusion, suspicion – each one separate but related, and threatening to tear a new hole in the already fragile foundation of community in my writing center. How do we feel, what do we do, how does a community survive when the story we’re experiencing isn’t the story we want or expected - when it is, in a word, terrible? After McKinney’s Peripheral Visions, we know our labor and our centers do not look, act, and feel cozy, iconoclastic, or focused on one-on-one tutoring all of the time. And yet, if we are going to continue to move beyond the grand narrative, a deep and meaningful understanding of community is essential. When we put our story in relation to our communities, then our story becomes just one thread in a much more complex tapestry. We cannot separate one person’s story from the story of the writing center. Each person, each story, is a stitch in the rhetorical fabric of community. Using critically reflexive stories to change and shape practice, this thesis highlights the grand narrative of community and shows how that narrative serves to stymie community growth. These stories resist boundaries. They are wayward. They are counter to the narratives around which we construct our lives. When we share stories and write together, we begin to understand the threads we’re all weaving into the tapestry – our community, stitched together through shared practice; a process that will never end, as each person comes and goes. The community will never be resolved, and in the ambiguity of boundlessness, comes a new way of seeing the world - through constellations and the dwelling in inbetween.