Join us this Tuesday, October 4, in the Scott Library Collaboratory to celebrate the research achievements of Lenny Bulze, a Professional Writing alum and DARE recipient.

Lenny will be sharing findings from her project, “Coding and/as Writing for Humanities Pedagogy,” at the poster celebration for the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE).

Now in its fifth year, the DARE program awards undergraduate students $5,000 and the unique opportunity to work with a faculty member on a designated research project. Lenny is one of 38 students from across the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies who were awarded this year’s DARE grant and will be sharing research at this event.

With this award, Lenny collaborated with Dr. Brandee Easter, an Assistant Professor in the Writing Department, to research how the theories and approaches of writing studies might be useful for teaching programming to new learners, especially writing and humanities studies. 

As a writer and artist, Lenny focused her research on understanding how code and creativity intersect. She explored how those connections can motivate humanities students to pursue programming and what pedagogical approaches would support this learning.

Lenny has mobilized this knowledge through publishing an autoethnographic video series, which is freely available online. This five-part video series explores how creativity and code intersect through Lenny’s own experience bringing programming to her work as a pixel artist. 

“Lenny’s unique perspective—as a writer, artist, video editor, scholar, and now coder—is an immense contribution for bringing a humanities perspective, and ultimately more voices, to programming,” Dr. Easter said. “The potential reach and impact of this project was further magnified by Lenny’s idea to publish this knowledge as an accessible video series.”

Lenny hopes her findings will help other creatives consider why and how they might begin coding, and Dr. Easter is looking forward to using these videos in her class next Winter, WRIT 3012: Programming for Professional Writers.

Lenny will also carry the experience from DARE into her future career: “DARE supplied me with knowledge on ways that I can develop my art and storytelling. I now have experience with JavaScript and several text editors (e.g., atom and p5.js editor). Additionally, it helped to prepare me for a career in digital authoring, which I became interested in during my final year of my undergraduate studies. This DARE experience gave me the opportunity to create art, edit videos and write a script detailing the work I've done on this project — all skills that I will need to have in my future digital authoring career.”

DARE is an annual program for students in LA&PS and a great opportunity for Writing Department students. Previous Writing Department awardees have included Sophie Morgan, Jessica Oliveria de Silva, and Annie Park. 

We hope you can join us to celebrate Lenny’s achievements!