Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In light of Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating Baylor power couple Drs. Preston and Genie Dyer with this classic article from our May-June 1991 issue.
“We’re a family that’s in the business of families,” says Dr. Preston Dyer (B.A. ’60), professor of sociology and social work and director of the social work program. And indeed they are. Dyer and his wife, Dr. Genie Dyer, a lecturer in sociology (B.A. ’59), are team teaching Sociology 3354 – “Marriage and the Family.” That makes them a couple in the business of couples, working together in the business of togetherness – communicating about communication.
The team of Dyer and Dyer has been together a long time (married thirty-one years this June) and they’ve led numerous marriage enrichment seminars together, but team teaching is a new experience. Genie earned her Ph.D. in Family Studies from Texas Woman’s University in August of 1990, and in September she joined Preston (Ph.D. in Sociology ’76 from TWU) to teach two sections of “Marriage and the Family” – a class Preston had been teaching for twenty years at Baylor.
The advantages to team teaching are numerous, they agree, and they praise Baylor for buying into the progressive concept. Although the Dyers have met several other professors who are team teaching this class at other universities, they’ve yet to run across another husband/wife team.
One of the advantages of having both of them in front of the class is that the one who isn’t doing the talking cam watch the class and keep “tuned in” to the students’ reactions, they say.
“It’s also important for students to get both the male and the female perspective,” says Genie.
“And, frankly,” she adds, “many of them have never seen a truly functional marriage in action. Often they don’t know anyone who’s been happily married for thirty years!”
Teaching together keeps the Dyers honest, too. The students know they’re telling the truth about their relationship, Genie says, because they’re both there to hold each other accountable.
In fact, that’s how it all started. About ten years ago, Genie started coming to the last session of Preston’s “Marriage and the Family” class for a question-and-answer session. The students could ask her anything they wanted.
“Then they could find out if Preston had been telling the truth all semester,” Genie jokes.
She then started helping with some of the sessions on sexuality; pretty soon, she was a regular visitor to the class.
But teaching the whole semester together is another thing entirely, both parties agree. When asked if he ever felt that Genie was infringing on his “territory” since he’d been teaching the class so long, Preston says “yes – and no. Doing the class with Genie meant I had to spend more time developing and planning,” he says. “Even though I’d been revising an entire unit each year, I did a lot of the revising in my head and put it down at the last minute. Now I have to tell someone as we go along. During the first semester, the inconvenience made me angry sometimes.”
But, practicing what they preach, the Dyers communicated about the problems and resolved the conflicts.
Having worked on a book together in 1988 (The Language of Married Love, Convention Press), they were already familiar with each other’s work habits, strengths, and weaknesses. The work arrangement tends to evolve, they say. Now when worrying over an impending deadline, Genie tries to remember that Preston could be “working the project our in his head.” And he agrees to meet deadlines so that she can get her part done.
Despite the adjustments, the Dyers believe it is all worthwhile. They hope that their efforts this semester will help the 257 people in their classes function better in their present and future families. Because over 90 percent of their students will marry and start families, the Dyers want to communicate their enthusiasm for marriage and their belief that it can be joyful and satisfying experience. But they emphasize that good relationships don’t happen naturally but are the result of conscious effort.
“A marriage is not something that results from a wedding,” they say. Hopefully, the relationship that leads to marriage begins long before the ceremony and the wedding itself is only another step in building the marriage. On the day of the wedding, you may have the raw materials to build a strong marriage, they say, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The Dyers try to communicate the fact that disagreements and complications will arise in every marriage, no matter how much “in love” the partners are. This is sometimes difficult information to get into the stubbornly romantic heads of Baylor coeds.
Based on Genie’s dissertation, the Dyers have incorporated into the class a particularly appropriate session on dual-career couples. They describe dual-career couples as those in which both partners are committed to establishing and maintaining a career and a family life. They are pursuing job sequences that require commitment, continuous development, and a sense of mastery and responsibility – as opposed to the dual-earner couple, who just hold paid jobs.
The Dyers help the young Baylor idealists come to grips with the difficulties of dual-career couples – problems like household responsibilities, relocation opportunities, child care, and time management.
Naive little voices chirp about the room, with comments like:
“You should do whatever you want without feeling guilty.”
“You should think about that before getting married.”
“If you marry a pastor, you should expect to move a lot and not be bothered by it.”
“My mother was always home with us, and I would never leave my children.”
Although most alumni readers are now chortling a loud “HA,” the Dyers are admirably tolerant. They calmly illustrate the types of situations that can arise by telling real-life stories about friends or their own children. The students float down off the clouds a bit, and begin to understand. After class, they crowd around the front of the room, asking more questions and telling personal stories of their own to the Dyers.
But the idealism that sometimes blossoms in the classroom can be misleading. The stereotype of the Baylor kid from the perfect family with 2.5 children, two loving parents, and a generous income just doesn’t hold up.
The Dyers have learned a lot about the diversity in family backgrounds through a new assignment they give the students. For each unit of the semester, students my earn extra credit points by writing “reaction papers” about their own families.
“Much of what we teach is theoretical, so these papers help the students apply the theory to a particular situation,” Genie explains.
Topics include assignments like:
“Describe a crisis that has occurred in your family and how your family dealt with it. Was the effect positive or negative?”
“Discuss ways in which your gender and societal sex role definitions have limited you. How are they beneficial for you?”
“Describe a situation of family conflict and how it was handled.”
Through these papers the Dyers have learned that their classes include kids from broken homes, single-parent homes, kids with a parent that’s been married six or more times, kids who have a disabled parent, and kids who have had very serious tragedies happen to a parent or sibling.
The papers provide a valuable link with the students, and keep the Dyers in touch with what’s happening in students’ lives. But it’s a perk that wasn’t possible with just one professor. The team teaching approach allows the time necessary for reading papers from hundreds of students.
The Dyers encourage a unique openness in the students through the open book policy they employ about their own relationship. They share their own setbacks, triumphs, difficulties, arguments, and joys. They build a trust relationship with the class that allows them to cover difficult and very personal topics and hopefully make life more fulfilling for the students.
The semester begins with an exploration of the “family of origin,” the family into which you were born. Preston explains the importance of the family of origin to the computer-age class with a high-tech analogy.
“The family of origin is like the defaults set on your computer,” he says. “The computer is set up to run a certain way, but once you understand it, you can go in and make changes. You have options and you can make decisions about your future. We want to help you open up your options.”
Next, the students delve into the topic of communication, covering anger and conflict resolution. The Dyers teach listening skills, self-disclosure skills, ways to give effective feedback, and how to overcome defensiveness – the most difficult communication barrier to eliminate.
Most people think that communication is expressing yourself clearly, which is important, but the harder skill to learn is the skill of listening, the Dyers point out.
“Listening is more than maintaining a polite silence while rehearsing in your mind the speech you are going to make as soon as you get an opening,” they emphasize. The Dyers explain nonverbal listening skills as well as the kinds of questions that are best asked to let the person know you are listening and to make sure you understand.
Then they move on to relationship development – dating, falling in love, and selecting a mate. They even include a class on date rape.
The section on the early marriage relationship covers hot topics like gender roles, intimacy, and sexuality. The Dyers have noticed that their usually talkative students often develop acute laryngitis during the sexuality sessions, so they allow students to turn in written questions about sexuality, which the Dyers answer freely for them.
It works well to cover sexuality about halfway through the semester, the Dyers believe, because they have had the time to build a trust relationship with the students. They also feel it’s important to first establish the importance of communication and honesty in relationships, and to discuss sexuality within the context of marriage.
Naturally, after sexuality comes pregnancy, birth, parenting, and child care.
The class winds down with sessions on mid-life, the ending of relationships through death or divorce, and the effects of both. Remarriage is also discussed, as is the concept of marriage enrichment – the nourishing of a healthy marriage.
The Dyers describe the class as taking a “life cycle” approach, beginning with the family of origin, and going all the way through the end of a marital relationship.
In addition to helping Baylor students deal with the challenges their future marriages may bring, the Dyers are also at work helping students’ parents. During campus orientation weekends throughout the summer, the Dyers offer a unique workshop for the parents of incoming freshmen. Titles “Enriching Family Relationships in the Emptying Nest,” the workshop focuses on how to parent adult children.
“You should see the looks we get when we first refer to their kids as adults,” Preston notes.
Marriage enrichment is another big part of the seminar, and it comes at an important time for these couples. They may be just beginning to plan the rest of their lives after children, and the Dyers sometimes find big differences in the expectations of the husbands and wives.
“The wife may be thinking of resuming a career, opening her own business, or going back to school, but the husband has been wanting for her to be able to travel with him, or take a little better care of him,” Preston says.
It’s an important time for couples to reassess their goals and make sure they’re communicating their expectations.
One consistent trend the Dyers have noticed is that parents are much more likely to be having celebrations rather than depression about emptying the nest!
The two Dr. Dyers have devoted their lives to helping families, particularly the marriage partners, and are constantly in pursuit of excellence in the fields of family relations and marriage enrichment.
In 1990 they were awarded the Moore-Bowman Award for meritorious service to Texas families. The award was presented by the Texas Council on Family Relations in honor of the Dyers’ significant contributions in the area of marriage enrichment for the last sixteen years.
The marriage enrichment movement focuses on helping couples discover relationship skills before their relationships get into serious trouble. It encourages growth in healthy marriages.
“Because the marital partners are the architects of the family, the joy or the pain experienced in the marriage is felt throughout the family,” Preston says.
The Dyers are both certified Marriage Enrichment Leaders and have led marriage enrichment seminars nationwide and developed several of their own programs and materials. They developed a three-part program for couples int heir home church in Waco, and several times a year they offer a weekend workshop, “Growing Together,” for engaged or newlywed couples.
Their list of academic credentials is impressive, but the important thing to the Dyers is their commitment to the family as an institution and to their own family. The stories they relate about their two grown children reveal the closeness of their relationship. Both kids are in the “family” business – their daughter is a child-care professional in Waco, and their son is a social worker in Phoenix.
Their new adventure in team teaching at Baylor has led the Dyers to even deeper levels of enrichment and communication, and they seem to love every minute of it. They see it as just another step together in a growing relationship, and the ease with which they share the responsibilities of the class is a reflection of their relationship “backstage.”
Like the way they work together as teachers, the way they work together as a couple and as heads of a family has evolved. They don’t consult one another about every decision (“that would be inefficient”), but they reach important decisions on a consensus basis.
And in thirty-one years, they’ve always been able to reach a consensus. Neither has veto power, they say, so they just keep communicating until one of them changes his or her mind or a third alternative comes up. They’ve never reached a stalemate, and they don’t think that it’s just luck.
Through experience or competence, they say, each one has assumed certain responsibilities. He cooks and she does the dishes. She keeps the books and does the bills (he doesn’t even know his salary), and he keeps up with their investments. When they write together, she gets the facts down and he adds the stories.
“That’s what’s neat about being married and having a partner,” he says. “You don’t have to do everything yourself; you have someone to share with.”
