Joanne Kilgour – a life of teaching and learning

Dr Kilgour Dowdy would be mostly remembered from her involvement in the ground breaking work of Banyan television. According to Christopher Laird, founder and CEO of Gayelle The Channel and co-founder of Banyan, she started working with them in 1975.

“Her first production was while she attended Holy Name Convent where they did a presentation called The Model and she was the star and they won the School Dance Festival. Then she became more active, and she starred in the soap opera Who the Cap Fits in 1977 and she did a great job,” he said. She also starred in other shows which included Epiphany and Cultural Callaloo.

In a phone interview recently she talked about her life in Trinidad and how she became a professor in the United States. Dr Kilgour Dowdy was first raised in St James, but moved to her grandmother’s home in Woodbrook where she lived with her older brother and sister until her father remarried after her mother died. She has two younger half sisters.

Dowdy attended Newton Girls RC and then Holy Name Convent and after that she worked at Republic Bank for a year. She got a scholarship to attend Boston University and she also attended the prestigious Juilliard School of the Arts in New York, where she concentrated on classical theatre.

Dr Dowdy went on to earn a graduate degree in English at Columbia University and a PhD in literacy studies at the University of North Carolina. She taught at Georgia State University before joining the faculty at Kent State. When asked what inspired her to make the transition from drama to teaching, she said: “I was teaching drama in high school, and students were not doing well in academics. I wanted to study reading and have more tools in the classroom to give more students more support for them to be successful,” she said.

She admitted that she was always teaching from a very young age.

“People would say Joanne was teaching from the time she could talk. I was allowed to be a leader at Newtown girls, I was allowed to be a leader at Holy Name Convent and at the Caribbean School of Dancing,” she said. She says that one of the things she likes about teaching is that she likes that she learns.

“I think it is the best way to learn, stay young, active and vibrant, teaching is one of the best remedies. You would always ask questions, always get answers because you are learning from people. When you have 30 students, you have 30 teachers. Everyone has a new angle, a new question, if you like that way in being in the world, teaching is your Nirvana,” she said.

Dr Dowdy is the recipient of the 2009 American Educational Research Association Narrative and Research Special Interest Group’s Outstanding Book Award. Her book is a collection of interviews with female African-American professors in Northeast Ohio and relays their experiences in obtaining a PhD and working in academia.

“I wanted to ask black women who earned their PhD about their journey and some of their challenges and to share words of wisdom to those who may be considering the PhD ranks,” she said.

When she found out she won the award she said it took a little while for it to sink in.

“After it sunk in I called the people who helped me along the way and those who paid for my PhD, I always fill them in on my achievements, for them to see their investments were not in vain, it is important that we always say thank you,” she said.

In her spare time Dr Dowdy has picked up the art of making candles. “I love candles, I love giving them, because I use them everyday. It started when I noticed there was a lot of wax left over after burning a candle so I started reforming the wax. I have been doing that for more that two years and I am just as fascinated now as I was when I started,” she said.

Dr Dowdy is celebrating her 50th birthday this year and intends to have a celebration every month of the year.

“For March I did a one woman show called Between Me and the Lord, the second installment. The first one was done in 1990. For April, I just did a presentation for my colleagues, a snapshot of my life in television in Trinidad, presented photos that I collected over 40 years,” she said.

Dr Dowdy has published six books to date including The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom; GED Stories: Black Women & Their Struggle for Social Equity; Readers of the Quilt—Essays on Being Black, Female and Literate and she advises upcoming writers to try and focus on what their message is and write it down.

“So it remains clear in your mind, start plotting, how am I going to break up the contents, the chapters. Try and figure out what each section would have in it, give yourself a time line where you can work on each section by yourself.

“One page is equal to two paragraphs, write one page a day for 300 days, cut and paste from what you have, if you tell yourself you are going to write 300 pages a week it is overwhelming. You have to commit yourself and you want to keep that time line working,” she explained.