Melisa Cahnmann

University of Georgia | UGA · Department of Language & Literacy Education

Transdisciplinary Research in Language Education

The authors share a theatre game used with language learners that connects students performances with objects and in their bodies to the work of curating displays at a museum.

A grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered educators and artists in Georgia an opportunity to test the influence of social media as a rhetorical tool for discussion.

What does it mean to queer the L2 classroom and why does it matter? Building on inclusive pedagogical approaches, this paper considers what queering looks like/sounds like/feels like in the context of two case study classrooms where language teachers learned about Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) methods in a novice Mand...

In this paper we document the precarity of translingual pedagogies (Canagarajah, 2013), those occurring when languages are in contact and mutually influencing each other with emergent meanings and grammars. Sharing translingual art and literature during a public Lunar New Year Celebration, we turn to memoir methodologies for understanding “trans” p...

Challenging authoritative narratives to understand “exotic” others, anthropologists increasingly turn toward a variety of new, investigative forms to investigate social science questions and under- standings. Educational scholars often refer to innovative and creative methodologies as “arts- based research,” embracing the highly individual- ized, h...

The foreign language classroom affords conversations related to heteronormativity, language, and power, but instructional approaches often center upon discrete aspects of grammar and vocabulary. Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) disavows such approaches, instead utilizing personalized questions and co-created stories. Que...

*Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2018). Sentence Diagram Dolor. English Journal, 100 (2), 109. *Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2018). Poetry Reading, Writer's House Philadelphia. English Journal, 100 (2), 109.

There are several interrelated themes in arts-informed pedagogies in the teacher preparation: 1) arts as tools to improve academic achievement in other content areas (e.g. math, science); 2) arts as holistic and dynamic process for meaning-making, 3) arts for teachers' own professional identity and satisfaction (e.g. for teacher reflection, teacher...

Article can be found here; https://www.eckleburg.org/whats-fair-and-unfair/ Understanding the intersections of language learning and racial identity.

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2018). Community conversations: University of Georgia [NEA Big Read Chinese New Year]. (Interview with N.R. Thomas). Retrieved March 6 2018 <https://www.artsmidwest.org/news/2018/03-06/nea-big-read-community-conversations>

This is my second poetry manuscript in process and seeking a publisher

This paper examines the possibility of viewing TESOL teachers’ identities through the metaphor of ‘poet-teachers’, viewing second language teachers as creative and collaborative meaning-makers. We analyzed interviews, poems and classroom discourse among 16 Chinese, Vietnamese and English L1 speakers who participated in poetry writing course as a co...

Cahnmann-Taylor, M., Nuruddin, S. N., Zhang, K., Wang, Y., Deaton, A. B., Meng, X, Brown-Lemley, A., Sun, M. (2019). Critical intersections through poetry in a TESOL & world language graduate education program. Intersections: Critical issues in Education, 3 (2), 138-154.

Queer theory problematizes societal norms related to sex, gender, and sexuality, while resisting normalcy. The authors utilize a queer theoretical approach in analysis of participant observation in adult Spanish and Mandarin classes as well as interviews with world language teachers. Analysis of interview data reveals how educators and adult langua...

Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe? Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus. Her book, "Imperfect Tense: Poems," was recently published by Whitepoint Press (2016). Many of the poems in this book reflect on what Cahnmann-Taylor learned while serving in 2013-14 as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Oaxaca (Mexico), wh...

What does it mean to engage in arts-based research? Where does this tradition come from and how has it been accepted in the world of language education research and scholarship? This chapter defines arts-based research, identifying early developments, major contributions, and the current state of the field. Numerous contributors’ works, or scholART...

What does it mean to engage in arts-based research? Where does this tradition come from and how has it been accepted in the world of language education research and scholarship? This chapter defines arts-based research, identifying early developments, major contributions, and the current state of the field. Numerous contributors’ works, or scholART...

Teachers of World English are no longer charged with teaching a fixed set of grammar rules and lexical choices but with teaching creative ways to navigate varieties of English and other world languages according to a wide set of contextual variables. Although there is a great deal of advocacy for teaching creativity and strategy in TESOL classrooms...

Do you know the top five Spanish speaking countries in the world? Mexico with 117 million Spanish speakers; Spain with 47.2 million; Columbia with 47 million; Argentina with 41 million, and the US with 38.3 million. That means we're almost tangoing Argentina out of fourth place! [imagine the"US" actor tangos "Argentina" across stage]. More and more...

This article examines how Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed exercises helped instructors and pre-service teachers navigate the consequences of ventriloquized, racialized discourses in a pre-service world language teacher education classroom. Applying a critical and performative approach, we analyse the mostly White student–actors’ varying representa...

Cahnmann-Taylor draws on Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed to offer a practice for literacy teachers and coaches that can open up multiple perspectives and multiple levels of intentions and motivations for a teacher's decision making. She challenges coaches and teachers to engage in artistic examinations of multiplicity to move toward performing com...

Cahnmann‐Taylor remembers her first encounter with Dell Hymes at an open mic event at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. She puzzles his complex stance on the role ethnographic poems might play in one's ethnographic project. In Dell Hymes's honor, she shares a poetic rendering of a speech event from her bilingual educat...

Anthropology has seen major challenges regarding methods, epistemologies, and how one writes ethnographically. As practicing ethnographers and poets, we focus on one among many vibrant new styles of anthropological scholarship: ethnographic poetry. As poetry appears more regularly in scholarly venues, anthropologists may wonder how to create ethnog...

As U.S. school districts struggle to address persistent achievement gaps between increasing numbers of English language learners (ELLs) and their native-English-speaking counterparts, many districts are moving away from segregative models like pull-out to implement more collaborative approaches such as coteaching, or push-in. In contrast to pull-ou...

Background/Context For over two decades, the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities have become blurred, and numerous articles and books have been written about the infusion of the arts in qualitative research as a means to collect and analyze data and to represent findings. Yet these arts-based research processes, although prese...

While early childhood education programs seek to provide the tools to work with children and explore content, many fail to address the social and emotional contexts in which early childhood education occurs. This is evident in the seldom addressed topic of collaboration between lead teachers and assistant teachers in the early childhood classroom....

This paper describes a bilingual-bidialectal poetry writing programme set up in a community library in the southeastern United States for multi-age learners. The authors explore the use of poetry as a vehicle for biliteracy development. The analysis draws on observations of the students’ engagement with poetry both in terms of their writing and the...

This paper describes and analyzes the use of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (TO) as a form of academic and social support used in a recruitment and retention program for bilingual teachers in the Southeastern United States. We use critical discourse analysis to understand how TO works to disrupt monologic relationships and reestablish dial...

This article draws upon multiple genres including theoretical scholarship, personal narrative, interview data, and poetry to reflect on experiences of language variation among Latino bilingual youth. The author shares insights acquired through the process of scholARTistry, and concludes with arguments for increased reading, living, and writing of p...

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This article describes the work of a bilingual educator who "translated" herself from a teacher working within the deficit structures of bilingual education to an individual who worked creatively within those structures so that she and her students could resituate them-selves in positions of authority and value. This one-year study of a bilingual c...

Comparing data from two ethnographic studies of bilingual teachers and their students in the United States, the authors present a cross-case analysis that illuminates how issues of language are inextricably linked with issues of race, class, and socioeconomic status. The authors show how portraits of teachers’ practice help to examine some of the c...

Developing a poetic voice prepares scholars to discover and communicate findings in multidimensional, penetrating, and more accessible ways. The author explores the craft, practice, and possibility for a poetic approach to inquiry among teaching and learning communities and encourages all researchers, especially those using qualitative methodologie...

This article presents findings from an ongoing study of urban teachers' efforts to embrace mathematics reform with student populations that are culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse (CLSD). We investigate the teacher's role in providing accessible and valuable mathematical learning opportunities to diverse students. Through narr...

This critical ethnographic study is about how bilingual students, their teachers, and other authority figures use language to either exacerbate or make productive use of existing tensions between official discourses of assimilation and unofficial discourses of pluralism and resistance in and around the bilingual classroom. While much has been writt...

Examines mathematics instruction and its relationship to issues of language, culture, and power in a low-income urban elementary school with large numbers of bilingual students. Results of discussions of student work during a summer training institute for university researchers, teachers, and administrators provide suggestions for approaching issue...

Changes in politics, the economy, demographics, and local leadership all led to the establishment of the Potter Thomas Bilingual School in Philadelphia in 1969. This paper examines the school?s history and how it has created, implemented, and sustained various language policies that have constituted its bilingual program over the last 30 years. Usi...

For over a decade the recruitment of bilingual, Spanish-English adults into teacher education programs in the United States has been an unrealized goal. Although in 2000 Latinos were the largest minority group under the age of 18 (16%), there are relatively few Latino teachers in American K-12 classrooms (4%) and fewer still who are fluent in Spani...