My academic identity is that of a folklorist, and for many years I have taught only folklore courses. My general goal is to teach students to read, write, and think critically, by introducing them to the discipline of folkloristics. I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions. Thus when I lecture on a particular genre, I make a habit of drawing upon the repertoires of the members of the class. In this way, the students not only learn what folklore is, but they are able to participate actively in the learning process. My "lectures" are often exercises in teacher-student interaction, exercises in which I probably learn as much as my students.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed. Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant. Each student collects approximately forty distinct items, including proverbs, riddles, folktales, folksongs, and legends. They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method. The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it. I am put in contact with all kinds of different folklore data, much of it now very familiar, but often interpreted in a new way, and some of it entirely unfamiliar to me. These folklore collections are filed in the Folklore Archives in Kroeber Hall. In this way, the hard work of each class serves as a valuable teaching aid for the next class.

There is more to folklore research than fieldwork. This is why in all of my other upper-division courses I require a term paper involving original research. Here I do my best to teach students how to plan and carry out a piece of research. If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

The vast majority of my undergraduate students are not at all interested in becoming professional folklorists. I would like to think that they learn how to appreciate and analyze the folklore that they are bound to encounter throughout their lives and by so doing enrich their lives to some degree.