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.

In this remark Dundes frames folklore training as a full research apprenticeship rather than a purely interpretive or theoretical pursuit. He emphasizes a sequence of competencies: collecting materials in the field (ethnographic method), mastering bibliographic control of prior scholarship, conducting rigorous library-based investigation, and finally disseminating results through publication. The list implies a professional standard for folklorists—students should be able to move from data gathering to scholarly conversation and contribute new knowledge in durable form. It also reflects Dundes’s broader insistence that folklore is an empirical discipline with its own methods and that students should be trained to produce publishable research, not merely consume or appreciate folklore.