Tag Archives: books

My Story Episode 20: Harry Potter and Pedagogy

 

2016-11-09

Episode 20 of the BYU English Society’s podcast, My Story, features Nicole Westenskow, Whitney Sommerville, Tyler McCombs, and Stephen Nothum. This dynamic team of English Teaching Majors came together a few years back as a unsettled group BYU students. After doing their time at the university they are all now teaching full time here in Utah, and have made themselves known to the world for their unique achievements while here at BYU. In this episode the groups shares with us their unique pathway to the English Teaching Major, and highlights their experience while conducting research on Harry Potter and Pedagogy (for those of you who don’t know, that means teaching methods). This episode is a must listen for all of those Harry Potter fans, English Teaching hopefuls, and anyone else who wants to know a whole lot about what it means to be an English Major. Play the podcast embedded below, and check out all of our awesome episodes featuring stories on how to apply your English by visiting the BYU English Society SoundCloud page.

Check out the interview HERE

My Story Episode: Lindsay Owens, Digital Humanities Minor

2016-10-11

Episode 16 of the BYU English Society’s podcast, My Story, features Lindsay Owens, an English Major with a Minor in the Digital Humanities. Lindsay has always had a passion for writing and creating websites so she decided that she would combine the two and make her dreams a reality. When she faced opposition as she studied programming she decided to change to print and web publishing. As a result of her Digital Humanities Minor she added two more minors one in Graphic Design and another in Creative Writing. Lindsay is taking on the world of web design one print publish at time, and showing the skills that the English Major has given her. With the approach of graduation Lindsay is excited to explore the world of digital humanities even more, and she invites you to do the same! Play the podcast embedded above, and please check out all our episodes featuring stories about how to apply your English Major by visiting the BYU English Society SoundCloud page.

Lindsay’s Interview

Hello, I’m Erin Nightingale

I’m a musician, a composer, a novelist, a poet, a book lover, an onomast . . . and I’m an English Major.

Really, I don’t know where I’d be without writing. I am blind, but when I was younger I could see better, and back then I considered myself an artist. I was constantly drawing, painting, and sculpting. I was fairly certain that art would be in my future. But I lost most of my sight when I was ten years old, and could no longer see to draw. Therefore, I had to find new ways of doing art. I taught myself how to play the piano, and have been composing music for eight years. But this wasn’t enough. Soon I discovered the world of words, and began writing poems and novels. I have six completed novels and over thirty poems to date. I’ve been told that my writing style is very colorful. Another one of my loves is teaching. I m studying currently to become an English teacher. It is in this way that art, in one form or another, has made it into my future, and will continue to be a vital part of what makes me me forever.

One of my favorite books is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

How Digital Media Keeps Me Reading (and liking it)

Have you heard those tragic stories about people who, after spending four years (or more) completing their English major, don’t like to read anymore? To me, they’re sort of like the tales of the Loch Ness monster: people have supposedly seen it, but certainly haven’t. And I don’t intend for it to happen to me.

I think the reason such things occur (this is all conjecture, though, since like I said, I’ve yet to meet a book-less former English major) is that people get so swept up into their reading assignments for school that they forget to make reading their own experience. Then, when they graduate, they’ve forgotten how to actually enjoy reading.

Blog screenshot

Of course, when I first started book blogging, I hadn’t thought about any of this. I just thought, hey, I read a ton. Why not blog about it for the world to see?

I couldn’t have predicted how simply joining the book interwebs would both propel my reading and make me enjoy it more. We think of reading as a solitary activity–but in our digital age, it doesn’t have to be. Continue reading