Consultant Alumni Interview: Landon Berry

Dr. Russell Carpenter recently had the chance to catch up with Landon Berry, a Noel Studio consultant alum, to discuss his experiences while working in the program. Landon grew up in Danville, KY where he attended Centre College, majoring in Theatre and minoring in Creative Writing. While working towards his MA at Eastern Kentucky University, Landon molded his academic interests in performance, creative writing, and written composition to his personal interests in video games and digital media. Landon now studies video games and digital media as teaching resources for the composition classroom at the University of Central Florida (UCF) as a doctoral student in Texts & Technology. He spends hours playing video games each day, purely for academic purposes, of course.

• What is your current role, institution, and research interest?

Graduate Teaching Assistant, UCF, Game Studies and Digital Media. Doctoral Student, Texts & Technology PhD program.

• What led you to this phase of your educational career?

I have always been interested in pursuing a PhD. However, it wasn’t until I began working at the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity at EKU that I discovered my love for bridging the gap between video games and other digital media, and written composition.

• How did your experience and training as a consultant in the Noel Studio prepare you for your current role?

While at the Noel Studio I learned to thoroughly and critically engage with both an assignment, and more importantly, the assignment’s author. Because the Noel Studio focuses on consulting across all media, I learned to generate a discussion that steps outside the bounds of many traditional critical methods, and experience the work and author as partners in a global discussion, where understanding is found on the written page, on the net through academic databases, or even through the experience of playing something like Angry Birds. The Noel Studio taught me that anything can be made useful in an engaging discussion of a text.

• How did consulting in the Noel Studio help shape your career goals? Short-term (3-5 years) and long-term (5-10+ years)?

My work as a consultant at the Noel Studio illuminated my love for written composition, and the teaching of written composition. I made the decision to pursue my PhD while working at the Studio (3-5 years) and I plan on teaching written and digital composition at the college level, but am also interested in pursuing a career as a consultant for a video game company (5-10 years).

• What’s the most interesting project you plan to be involved in (or are involved in) at your current institution?

Currently, I am working as part of a team on a project that seeks to determine the applicability of Adobe certifications for people entering the job market for IT positions. Also, I am working on a personal project that will examine how strategies for the battle against video game piracy can be transposed to strategies for battling plagiarism in the composition classroom.

• What skills did you learn in the Noel Studio that have been helpful for you as a doctoral student and administrator?

I think above all else, the Noel Studio taught me how to create a common language that can connect any discipline and any medium so that a thorough, and engaging conversation can be had between two thinkers (consultant and consultee for example) who are working towards a common goal.

• What advice would you give to current consultants?  Any advice for future consultants?

Don’t be afraid to embrace the mundane or the imaginative. Anything from the architecture or color scheme of a consulting space, to the rhythm of a contemporary song can be used as a discussion point in a consultation. Nothing is off limits.

Contact Information

Dr. Rusty Carpenter
russell.carpenter@eku.edu
859-622-7403

Published on August 21, 2013