Faculty members, Eastern students and friends of the authors gathered on Tuesday in Buzzard Hall to enjoy advice and a book reveal from the newest authors: Brenda Yoho, Alexis Jones and Carrie M. Dale. Each author gave a summary of their book, as well as read a few specific inspiring passages from them.
Yoho’s book, Lead with Two Rules: Feeling Good & Feeling Safe, explains how she has experienced many hardships in life. After getting into a car accident and surviving with a traumatic brain injury, she felt an extreme need to publish a book about mental health and safety.
“Feeling good and feeling safe” are Yoho’s rules that follow her throughout life, and she feels that everyone should live by their own set of rules. In her book, she dives deeper into how these rules and an individual’s decisions will affect one’s life.
Jones also made many good points in her book, Teaching is a Human Interaction: How Thoughtful Educators Respond, are Responsive, and Take Responsibility. “I’m trying to sort of get readers aware of the complexity of teaching,” she explained.
Jones’ main focus of her book is to teach not only individuals in the education field, but anyone the importance of being a caring human and ways to properly handle human interaction.
Dale was very passionate about writing her first book, The Portal, which focuses on two vastly different characters. “When you’re the youngest in the family, you never get to do anything first,” she said. Between her passion behind reading and using words to communicate and her will to do something first, she was destined to publish a book one day.
Toward the end of the event, students and faculty had an opportunity to ask the authors many individual questions. In turn, they spoke about when their best time of day to write was, who their favorite childhood teachers were, and gave very useful advice to early education students that aren’t sure about the “proper ways” to teach.
The Department of Teaching, Learning and Foundations held the event. The department Chair, Bob Klein spoke about the opportunity to learn from the authors. “Bringing a book to publication is a labor of love and one that merits celebration, so we were motivated to share with the broader community by giving them a taste of each of the author’s books,” he stated.
One of the department’s main goals in hosting these types of events is to create a mutual understanding of material between readers and authors. Being able to actively listen to and engage with each other was a very powerful and successful way to accomplish this.
Mackenzie Fehrenbacher can be reached at 581-2812 or at mlfehrenbacher@eiu.edu.
