Black Women/ Black Literature

In the interview between Joanna Kilgour Dowdy and Christina McVay, Dowdy drove to get a clear understanding as to why and how Ms. McVay got into teaching about Black women and Literature in the Pan-African Department and McVay. She speaks of never having the intentions of teaching in that department, but claims that she kind of "fell into it". While drinking at a bar, she met a man that would help to open her eyes to many new things, which ultimately led her to change her educational teaching pathway. This is so interesting to me, because she claims," It kind of aggravated me that there is a freshman English program over there in Pan-African because I never got any Black students in my class, so if I do Black literature, its White me standing in front of a White classroom, and it's like we're talking about some alien universe". This is very interesting to me because, I don't understand how, at that time, a university could arrange to have teachers teach these lessons, but the people who relate to it the most aren't even able to listen in all because of racial discrimination.
I think that McVay's method of teaching is very interesting and effective. She asks her students to create a "slang dictionary", by adding their own examples and definitions of certain words, and then making a translation using the "proper" definition. In my opinion, this is very effective because it creates a colloquialism between to different types of "languages" ( which relates back to the importance of the "mother tongue" as explained in Richardson's To Protect and Serve).
I really enjoyed reading this article, and I feel that every teacher that is in the English department show add some of McVay's teaching techniques to their curriculum.