Digital Commons Network^™

Neo-Noir Investigations: The Art Of Directing And Writing An Interactive Experience, James Phillip Koehler Jr.

Honors Projects

This project intends to explore the process behind writing and directing for an interactive experience; video games, specifically. A team, including artists, programmers, and a musician, was organized to work toward the completion of a playable demo. Included in this project is a video of the playable demo, alongside various other completed materials that were unable to be included.

Teaching Empathy For Others Through Young Adult Literature, Madison Boeckman

Honors Projects

Literature can let a reader grow in empathy by learning about a character’s experiences and cultures. Teaching literature with diverse characters to young people can help combat bias and hatred towards people who are perceived as different.

This project uses Rudine Sims Bishop’s metaphor of mirrors, windows, and doors, Gloria Ladson Billings’ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally Responsive Pedagogy as foundation for creating activities for diverse literature. These activities are for the texts Ms. Marvel: No Normal, The Poet X, and The Marrow Thieves, all texts that are academically enriching with diverse characters that would …

Pause And Possibility: Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On Creative Writing Clubs, Stephanie Altier

Honors Projects

Creative writing clubs can enrich the lives of writers and facilitators. These clubs provide many opportunities to enrich their members’ academic, social, and personal development (Clifton, 2022; Siskel & Jacobs, 2011; Lawton, 2021). This project uses a focus-group study of five pre-service Integrated Language Arts teachers to explore the teachers' perspectives on advising creative writing clubs. Their insight informs a web-based teacher resource, Creative Writing Club Hub. Major findings are that participants harbor low self-efficacy towards creative writing and that the most effective method for encouraging them to advise these clubs may be to create a creative writing community …

Sorrow, Healing, And Hope: A Braided Narrative, Abigail Maggi

Honors Projects

This project is a creative nonfiction essay about sadness. In the form of a braided essay, I weave personal narrative with insight and guidance from therapists, psychologists, and friends. In this essay, I share my experience of sadness and how I have processed my emotions during challenging times. The essay is split into three sections – sadness, feeling a little better, and hope – to share my story, the skills I learned that helped me move through sadness, and my decision to choose hope despite and amidst the struggles.

Plant Wise, Sophia Llamas

Honors Projects

Conceptually, Plant Wise is the key to bridging the gap between preconceived ideas about vegan and vegetarianism and successfully integrating plant-based foods into your everyday life. Physically, Plant Wise is a self-educational, interactive booklet chock-full of activities intended for users to complete at their own pace. Inside this 56-page booklet, there are recipes, doodling spaces, weekly check sheets, activities to do with friends and family, challenges, and so much more. Plant Wise utilizes these activities and journaling opportunities throughout as a self-reflective vehicle to give users an experience to reflect on, which aids in the retention of what’s been learned …

The Puppy In The Polka Dot Pajamas: A Multimedia Approach To Children's Literature, Grace Phillips

Honors Projects

In a world that seemingly becomes crueler by the day, some topics are not handled with the tact they require and deserve. Issues of bullying and self-expression can often evoke undesirable emotions when discussed. Although it may be difficult to achieve, every child deserves to grow up in a world free of bullying that promotes authentic self-expression. To do my part – however minor it may be – in fostering a more accepting community, I used this project as an opportunity to create a story that shared anti-bullying messaging in a suitable and enjoyable manner for children.

Divinity School: A Novel, Ella Marie Schmidt

Honors Projects

I wrote Divinity School, an Honors Project for the Department of English, under the auspices of my project advisor, Professor Anthony Walton, and my readers, Professors Marilyn Reizbaum, Ann Kibbie, and Aaron Kitch. Divinity School is a novel whose conflicts are religious, generational, and familial. Set mostly in Hoboken, New Jersey with vignettes in Manhattan, Vienna, the west coast of Ireland, and an anonymous New England college town, it is the story of one family and the open secrets that keep them apart. Hal Macpherson is a Divinity School professor uged into premature retirement by allegations of misconduct; his …

Afterlife: Exploring And Accepting Ideas Through Children's Literature, Kiley Vandevelde

Honors Projects

This project is a written and illustrated book for children to assist with the grieving process by exploring different cultural representations of the afterlife. Death is an inescapable part of the human condition. Belief in an afterlife can help children retain a connection to the deceased and can be a useful tool for healing. While very young children (age four to five) inherently believe in existence after death, this decreases after the age of ten. This book targets children aged seven to ten and explains the benefit to believing in an afterlife. It explores different ideas surrounding the afterlife and …

Properly Unhinged: A Collection Of Poems, Madison Everett

Honors Projects

This is a collection of poems that explores the identities I possess and am a part of. These identities include being half black and half white, clinically diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Generalize Anxiety Disorder, pansexual or bisexual or something altogether different (depending on the day), and cis gendered womanhood. I also explore what a poem is and what a poem is not, and how there is very little difference between the two. In a lot of ways, this is an exploration into myself and what it means to be within the world. What does it mean to …

The Criterion Collection, Mackenna Finley

Honors Projects

The Criterion Collection is an examination of truth in fiction and poetry. The goal of this project is not to create truth that is absolute, but instead to allow for the experience of its subjectivity. The interplay between fiction and poetry, reader and author illuminates the subtle warping of truth through human experience.

The Keepers: A Collaborative Constructive Narrative Podcast, Shay Carroll

Honors Projects

This is a fictional podcast series that presents a story that is completed through roleplaying. The structure follows that of a video game, with the main characters, or "players," interacting with a set plot while deciding their own course of action. I act as the narrator for the story, controlling the plot and setting as well as non-player characters, or "NPCs." For the purposes of consistency and making sure the characters do not do anything that would be considered too over-powered or unrealistic, I have chosen to use the rule guide and statistics modifier system presented by Wizards of the …

This Is What You Want: Stories, Savannah Blake Horton

Honors Projects

This is What You Want: Stories is a collection of nine stories exploring the role of humor in dark situations. It is a work of fiction.

Trickling, Marissa Medley

Honors Projects

A collection of poetry and other writings that explore family relationships with a focus on mental illness.

Le Flâneur Contemporain: The Wanderer In The 21st Century, Zachary Kocanda

Honors Projects

This creative project is a love letter to walking, poetry, and the French language. The flâneur is a French literary type, the most famous example being Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire epitomizes la modernité, writing poetry about urban Paris in the nineteenth century. The flâneur's importance as a literary type continues in contemporary poetry. Through fifteen prose poems, the project examines what it means to wander in the twenty-first century.

Jameson's Story: A Tale Of The Human Condition Through Fiction, Steven Kubitza

Honors Projects

A work of fiction focusing on two characters living in the same world, but under much different circumstances. One must try and find out who he is while the other is attempting to uphold his way of life in a society threatening to take it away. The story delves into the ideas of a somewhat dystopian world; one in which our society could ultimately mirror in the near future. The work is unfinished, which is explained in the reflection paper at the beginning of the document.