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.

Dundes is underscoring a distinctive feature of teaching and researching folklore: unlike many disciplines that rely primarily on external archives or laboratory materials, folklore is carried by people in lived practice. In the classroom, students are not merely recipients of knowledge but also repositories and informants, arriving with traditions shaped by nationality, region, religion, ethnicity, work, and family life. The remark also reflects Dundes’s long-standing emphasis on collecting vernacular culture and treating everyday expressive forms as serious evidence. Implicitly, it argues for a participatory, comparative pedagogy in which diverse student experiences become primary data for analysis, interpretation, and ethical reflection.