The Power of Words
Dunn, Victoria (2010-03-15)
PART 1
>>INTERVIEWER: Who would you say was the biggest influence on your reading and writing?
>>VICTORIA DUNN: I would have to say my mother was the biggest influence on my reading and writing.  I'm the third of three children, so the baby of the family, and I was always stuck to my mom like glue.  Wherever she went I went.  A lot of times, I can even remember, when we in doctors' offices, or the beauty shop or somewhere I would always have a notebook with me.  So if I was and reading I was writing or drawing.  My mom was a big reader; neither of my parents went to college, but both were ministers so reading was embedded in our family practice. Of course reading the bible, but reading books period so it wasn't foreign territory to me at all to grow up in reading and writing and thinking about it.  Plus I was, believe it or not, shy as a kid.
[VICTORIA LAUGHS]
>>VICTORIA DUNN: So I was the one who was always off – my cousin tells me even to this day, you were the person who was off doing a crossword puzzle while we were getting messy and muddy.  My mother was – she, interestingly enough, she passed probably almost a decade ago and the thing that took away her home was not her jewelry, was not any article of clothing or any object that I could find valuable and some monetary way.  I took her books, the note books that were on her night stand and some poetry that she was writing.  I think in this woman who was clearly working class, owned a business, had a family, was very active in our church and community, and was still this aspiring scholar. I take a lot of my cues from her.
>>INTERVIEWER: Would you say this incorporated into your further studies of education?
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Oh, absolutely.  I think I said I'm from North Carolina and I came to Columbus in 1992 for the PhD. program in English actually. So that's how I got to Columbus, Ohio.  I didn't finish, and it's interesting that if you talk about that question of difficulty with writing and certainly we talked about my dissertation efforts and that was one of the biggest obstacles to finishing something that I had started in my academic career.  But up until that point I was writing about and studying about voice, and actually African American spiritual narratives, obvious connections to my own personal history, and looking specifically at black preaching women and how they articulate notions of who they are but also of the communities whom they serve.  So I was looking at this whole matter of voice and how you create. In the African American tradition, often there is an interactivity between hearers and listeners, and it's almost as if people become one, hearers and speakers I should say.  Specifically, in the church, there's this whole matter of somebody say something or "Say amen and somebody!" that kind of eliciting a feedback. 
>>VICTORIA DUNN: So I was interested in how that happens, especially for African American women and how we might see community differently.  So I was looking at determinants of this and I dedicated my work, which has yet to be finished and published, to my mom.  In the beginning chapters of the dissertation, which was called Women of the Word Change in Kind, Multivocalism in Black Preaching Women Texts or something; multivocalism being this matter of: "I speak with my community, I speak for others who are not so empowered to speak, and speak with others who are empowered"; all this matter of multiple voices.  
>>VICOTRIA DUNN: But I wrote the introductory chapter about her experience as a maid actually, before she opened her own business; way before she was a maid in a house that happened to be attached to a florist.  When she was cleaning up in the florist she learned the florists business and eventually managed another florist and then opened her own in, I think, in our garage in 1970 something.  So I saw someone who managed multiple roles: the servant for sure, by all means, in the late 1950s and early sixties; the manager or manipulator of someone else's expectations because all the time she was in the florist, she was just sweeping, she was never hired there.  She was just watching what they did, looking at what they did.  I sometimes think that's really how we come by writing competence; we're watching what other people do and say in texts. "Is that what good writers do? Okay, let me try that." "Is that what good readers practice?" That's how I learned to model, sort of, language acquisitioning of things.
>>INTERVIEWER: Okay, now you worked YSP.  Would you say that there's anything that could that you think could improved in the reading and writing aspect of YSP?  Or that you see is reflected in the students of YSP?
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Sure.  Young Scholars is a program, as you know, but some other listeners might not, so can I say a little bit about it?
>>INTERVIEWER: Mmhmm.
>>VICTORIA DUNN: It's an Office of Minority Affairs Young Scholars Program which is a pre-collegiate program for underrepresented students; to represents minority students, economically challenged family backgrounds who were in one of the nine urban school districts in and across Ohio, who show tremendous academic promise.  Reading and writing, to be honest, to not tend to be the areas where our students struggle.  In fact, if they struggle at all, for most of them it's not apparent until after high school.  The transition though, from high school to college, can sometimes be difficult, especially in terms of mathematical literacy.  That's a whole ball of wax that I want talk about so much today, the whereas say I see the students struggling with literacy, when they make that high school-college transition, is in the volume of reading and the complexity.  So we will have students, for instance, who always were good readers, know how to basically take a test and make sense of it, but there are ways in which college calls on you to add layers of meaning. I think that some of those things can't be taught; they simply have to be gotten by experience and reading more and more.  So if there was anything I would like to see us to it would be to encourage students to read more and more, whether that looked like reading clubs, or lately it has looked our summer academy students, like reading a full length text.  This year for instance we're reading one called And Still We Ride.
PART 2
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Ah, the trials and triumphs of 12 inner city students or something like that, gifted students, some of whose stories mirror our students.  We're trying to put not just classic texts and well known texts in front of students but texts that help them piece together their own literacy experiences.
>>INTERVIEWER: What does the word education mean to you?
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Ooh.  I love the question, oh that's nice.  Education means exposure, immersion, and – I'm a firm believer in the thought that nothing is wasted, no experience, no mistake, no apparent mistake, no meeting with a person in any sort of position in life.  So I don't think that there's anything that we ever encounter or meet up with that we can't learn from.  Education, I think of it as this constant process of exposure.  So whether that's exposure to ideas, concepts that challenge your own or reinforce your own, that's education.  The neatest thing about getting to work at the university and in education without necessarily being in the classroom is there we get to ask really great questions.  What happens if you offer research opportunity that also combines study abroad? We're working with a program within, I think, the Department of Anthropology, they'll do things like that.  What happens if students don't have the burden, if you will, of thinking about finances first and foremost and then they're really free to do their best work by a scholarship that this program provides?  So those are all matters of education.  
>>VICTORIA DUNN: But it's also, beyond exposure, it is intentional pursuit of clarity.  Some people would say truth, some would say: "Oh, that's a relative term", but all I really mean by that is that the scholar or the learner or the student is always, I believe, at best intentionally in pursuit of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and truth.  So that, again, nothing is wasted; everything you encounter today you add to what you knew yesterday, and you say: "Oh, now I see yesterday in light of what I learned today; it slightly changes from what I know now." It's a constant growth process, constant evaluation of what it is one knows and why?  I'll just say one more thing; I don't know -- and when I used to teach writing, because I taught it when I came in as a graduate student in 1992, I really thought that we wrote because of what we already knew.  So you sit down to write a paper based on what's here in your head, and what you've read in the book, in which you feel and there it is on the page.  I'm now beginning to see, I have since begun to see, writing as a discovery process.  I think somebody way more famous than me, but I will take their quote for a moment, said:
[VICTORIA LAUGHS]
>>VICTORIA DUNN: "I write in order to understand, I don't write what I understand but I write in order to come to that meaning.  So education is also that process of coming to meanings.
>>INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else you want to say about history, or that you want to put in the DALN?
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Yeah, I had been thinking about literacy experiences, a couple of really great things to happen.  I am, again, from North Carolina and one of the biggest disappointments in my life, so I thought, 19 years old, that I wouldn't get to go out of state to go college.  I cried for weeks and weeks and weeks of my first semester and I called home daily: "I don't want to be at this school!" I had gotten into UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina, it's a really good school I thought, really big school;  kind of North Carolina's version of Ohio State University, but I didn't get any financial aid.  My family was just that much too wealthy to really be qualified for financial aid, so I applied to this other college, very small, historically black women's college, Bennett College in Greensboro North Carolina.  Things are always working together for good for those who don't even know their working together for good for them.
[VICTORIA LAUGHS]
>>VICTORIA DUNN:  I was one of those people who ended up exactly where I should with the exposure, again, the exposure to exactly the right set of resources.  So in my first year I had an English professor who was teaching us about the very issues that came up in my dissertation project, that continue to come up in my thinking about young scholars, continue to come up even in my own writing and speaking.  I ended up writing my first college level paper on the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, and the power of words, the power of words to shape a culture, to shape politics, to shape policy literally, but also to galvanize the community strength.  I have been fascinated a long time in how we use words to motivate people to work together for the common good.  I had as well the experience of a colloquium, I forgot now what year this was, but I think it was my second or third year there and Bennett.  Famous authors were there: Marie Evans, Margaret Walter, I sat in the living room of Maya Angelou because at that time, when I was just about a senior graduating, she was partnering with Bennett on some projects.  There were famous, world renowned, black women writers in my experience and quite ordinarily so, or so it seemed to me at the time.  I don't think I realized until afterwards how extraordinary those exposures were and those opportunities were.  And I'm kind of glad I didn't because kind of what their glorious, I mean really grand presence brought to me was a comfort with wherever they are in the writing and learning process.  So I loved teaching 110, loved being the student, wrote a book a couple of years ago called Fill My Heart with the Love Shaped Void Food Was Never Meant to Feed, a book about weight loss and weight gain and image; kind of my own spiritual narrative.  I write songs, so there is writing in every single element of my life and comfort with that, whether it is with struggling writers or I am the struggling writer, which often enough I am.
[VICTORIA LAUGHS]
>>VICTORIA DUNN: Or whether it is with people who really achieved in that area.  I think that's important to know.