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Teaching Outside the Box

Joanne Kilgour Dowdy (Photo by Gary Harwood )

You only need to speak with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy (Group 16) for a moment to feel her passion for teaching, and her greater desire to empower teachers to find the value in all their students. Her techniques are multifaceted, personalized to her students, and energized with her pure delight in imbuing others with the power to teach. For Dowdy, every child matters. “If you can’t see the jewel in the child, you are the unfortunate one,” she says. “I am teaching these future teachers to go out and be jewelers, so they know a child’s gift when they see it and through their classroom curriculum mine the jewels in all their kids’ lives.”

Unlike so many Juilliard students whose undergraduate education comes directly after they complete high school, Dowdy, 47, had a full career on stage and TV in her native Trinidad prior to entering Juilliard’s Drama Division in 1983. As one of the founding members of Trinidad and Tobago Television Workshop (now known as Banyan TV), she was a part of groundbreaking work that strived to bring to Caribbean audiences their own stories, told in native voices. The body of work, still played on the national Trinidad TV station, gives Dowdy “a sense of belonging in Trinidad.” She notes with amusement that she is still introduced in Trinidad as the actress in “that soap opera.”

With the help of one of the founding fathers of Caribbean theater, the playwright Derek Walcott, Dowdy came to the United States to pursue an education in acting. What she found was much more than an opportunity to perfect her skills; it was a discipline that she carries with her in her teaching today. She says the balance her teachers achieved between expecting brilliance and nurturing the tools that produce artistic excellence still leaves her in awe. “Seeing those teachers work magic daily, that is the model,” she says. “How do I get students to understand their brilliance and aim for that standard?”

Dowdy went on to earn a graduate degree in English at Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literacy studies at the University of North Carolina. She taught at Georgia State University before joining the faculty at Kent State in Ohio, where she is now an associate professor in teaching, leadership, and curriculum studies. Although she is no longer pursuing an acting career, she says her teaching style is characterized by an interactive and multidimensional approach. “You have to figure out how to teach your way, with your students, in your context. I can only tell [them] the train tracks—beginning, middle, and end—how you get there is [the teacher’s] journey.” Just as no two productions of a classic work of theater approach it the same way, Dowdy says the same holds true in the classroom.

Her goal is to make her workshops and lectures transparent, laying out the elements as boilerplate for her students to pull from for their own classrooms. Dowdy was the recipient of Kent State’s 2005 Diversity Leadership Award, an honor that highlights her desire to value the arts equally with other learning tools such as reading and writing. Just like her Juilliard teachers, Dowdy challenges her students to “teach outside the box. Everyone wants to stay where they are comfortable—think creatively about how to teach and the whole world is yours.” Dowdy believes this artist’s approach to education affords teachers the ability to open the door of understanding to all of their students by engaging all their senses.

A prolific writer, Dowdy says her books (which include Readers of the Quilt—Essays on Being Black, Female and Literate) are filled with positive and empowering images of African-Americans, teachers, artists and women. They speak to struggles for social equality and for the importance of language and culture in our classrooms, and have become a safe space for others to communicate their journeys. Her latest book, Ph.D. Stories: Conversations With My Sisters, scheduled for release later this month by Hampton Press, is a study of women who have worked successfully in higher education. Through her interviews with women across Ohio, she found that for them, higher education can be a lonely road. Ph.D. Stories is a response to this need for community. By sharing experiences women will be able to recognize the issues and challenges ahead, overcome the odds, and succeed—something that anyone looking at Dowdy’s life and career would have to say she’s done remarkably well.

—Emily Regas
Associate Director of National Advancement and Alumni Relations

Alumni Relations

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