Education Quote by Alan Dundes

There is a quiet flex buried in Dundes's modesty: three hundred students, stacks of “folklore collections,” and he still insists on reading every last one. On the surface it’s a work-ethic anecdote, the kind professors tell to signal devotion. Underneath, it’s a statement about what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it.

Dundes is talking about student work as folklore in its living form, not a museum exhibit. The “tall order” line acknowledges the grind, but the pivot is the payoff: “I learn so much from it.” That reverses the usual classroom hierarchy. Students aren’t just apprentices repeating canon; they’re fieldworkers embedded in communities the university often treats as background noise. Dundes frames their collections as a research archive in real time, suggesting that culture is constantly being authored by ordinary people, and that an educator’s job is to keep up.

The specific intent reads as pedagogical and disciplinary at once. Pedagogical: he’s incentivizing careful collecting by promising attention, not just grades. Disciplinary: he’s defending folklore studies against the old suspicion that it’s quaint or unserious. If you can learn from hundreds of vernacular texts gathered by novices, the subject isn’t marginal; it’s inexhaustible.

Context matters: Dundes helped professionalize American folklore studies while pushing it toward interpretation, meaning, and social function. This quote is him modeling that stance in miniature - treating student “folklore” as data with dignity, and the classroom as a legitimate engine of discovery, not mere instruction.