KU News Release

Graduation stories: KU opens up world of opportunity for Wichita native

Dustin Stephenson-Reynolds

LAWRENCE — After entering the University of Kansas, Dustin Stephenson-Reynolds of Wichita could never have imagined he’d be spending the summer after his sophomore year in Morocco. Speaking Arabic. It was his first trip east of Kansas City.

Stephenson-Reynolds had come to KU planning to major in history and international studies. Enriched by his study-abroad opportunities, he now plans to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in French language and literature and a minor in Arabic studies. He is the son of Laurie Reynolds, a daycare provider in Wichita, and Fred Stephenson, a water treatment consultant in Durango, Colo., and a graduate of Wichita East High School.

“I’d never been to KU,” Stephenson-Reynolds said. “I wanted to go to a good school with lots of opportunities. With the scholarships, KU was the most affordable option, too. I wanted to get out of school without a lot of debt.”

That Arabic class was the first of many at KU and he now speaks, writes and reads Arabic in addition to the French he began studying in high school.

“I thought Arabic would be a good complement to French due to the colonial legacy and cultural ties. I’ve always enjoyed languages. So I started with Arabic,” Stephenson-Reynolds said.

His instructor was Abdullah Jaradat, who at the time was completing a KU doctorate in linguistics and whose native language is Arabic. Jaradat is now an assistant professor of linguistics at Hashemite University in Jordan.

“He was a great instructor,” Stephenson-Reynolds said. “He took lots of time outside class in discussion groups, talking about things we’d use in everyday real-life conversation — names of foods, speaking with people, vocabulary outside of the political or academic spectrum. The grammar can get so complicated it’s easy to lose sight of the beauty of the language as people actually use it.”

During his post-sophomore summer, with Jaradat as leader of the KU study abroad program, Stephenson-Reynolds went to Al-Akhawan (Two Brothers) University in Ifrane, where he concentrated on modern standard Arabic.

“He’s an excellent student — diligent, hardworking — and a promising scholar. We chose to offer for the first time this year a course in Koranic studies for those at his level,” said Naima Boussofara Omar, associate professor of Arabic studies and director of the Arabic Summer Institute affiliated with Al-Akhawayn University. Her native language is Tunisian Arabic, and she also is fluent in classical and modern standard Arabic, French and English.

“He approaches his studies with such a sense of responsibility and commitment and accomplishes what he sets out to do admirably,” she said. “He is genuinely interested and puts people at ease. That kind of manner and accessibility will help him get the most out of his studies.”

His love of languages is tied to his love of music. Stephenson-Reynolds has played the alto saxophone since fourth grade, has taken jazz studies at KU and performed with the KU Jazz Band and Jazz Combo I and II. This semester, he is taking independent, private study with Dan Gailey, associate professor of music and dance, director of jazz studies and also a saxophonist, and is studying jazz piano with Wayne Hawkins, lecturer in music and dance.

“Jazz is heavy on listening and auditory skills,” Stephenson-Reynolds said. “You listen analytically to recordings. You have to be sensitive to what the other musicians are doing. You listen for rhythm and articulation in jazz, which is essentially what pronunciation is in languages. It’s like studying vocabulary in another language.”

He spent the 2007-08 academic year in a rigorous, challenging study of modern Arabic at the American Language Institute at Fez, Morocco, as a National Security Education Program David L. Boren Undergraduate Scholar.

Unlike many images of “Morocco being all desert,” Stephenson-Reynolds said Fez was near the mountains. Also surprising to him was that “it wasn’t nearly as conservative as I thought it would be.”

He found his music was a great way to bond with people and other musicians in Morocco.

“I met an ethnomusicologist in Morocco, a lute player, and met a drummer, then performed with a his group of five musicians at a street café,” he said. “They were fascinated with my saxophone so I let them try it out.

“The café ‘stage’ was a rooftop overlooking the old city of Fez and the University of Al-Karaoine that’s been there since the ninth century and is the oldest degree-granting university in the world. It’s a Koranic school with a minaret. We had to stop for the call to prayer.”

Stephenson-Reynolds lived with a homestay family for a portion of his time as a Boren Scholar, made trips to the open-air seasonal markets and first tasted fresh figs and sampled native fruits similar to peaches, locally grown olives and fresh herbs.

“I tasted lamb for the first time in a tajine, a traditional Moroccan stew often made in a two-part dish with a cone-shaped top. And I tasted Moroccan tea, made with peppermint, green tea and so much sugar that it’s more like sugar flavored with tea.”

Stephenson-Reynolds will leave May 31 to continue his studies in Arabic literature with an emphasis on contemporary Arabic poetry as well as Egyptian culture and society at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo. The yearlong fellowship is offered through the University of Texas-Austin. He hopes to pursue additional graduate studies in Arabic literature, concentrating on the Maghreb region of the Arab world, where he believes his strong French background will be helpful in conducting research.

Thanks to those first classes at KU, Stephenson-Reynolds discovered that everywhere he went in Morocco, he found street scenes a great way to connect with people and provide a few surprises.

“I was taking a road trip and met a hitchhiker — hitchhiking is lots more common there than here — he was from a rural Berber area. He asked where I was from and I told him ‘from Kansas.’ When I asked him if he’d heard of Kansas, he said, ‘like the little girl with the red Oz shoes.’ ”

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