The creative ethnographer’s notebook
By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Kristina Jacobsen
Copyright date 2024
The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook offers emerging and trained ethnographers exercises to spark creativity to increase the impact and beauty of ethnographic study.
This resource can be used by anthropology and other social science instructors to teach students how to engage with creative approaches as well as how to do better public and engaged anthropology. Artists and arts faculty will also benefit from using this book to inspire culturally attuned art making that engages in research as well as research-based art.
Enlivening Instruction with Drama and Improv:
A Guide for Second Language and World Language Teachers
By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Kathleen R. McGovern
Copyright date 2021
This engaging and complete resource has everything you need to bring drama and theatre techniques into the ESL, EFL, or World Language Classroom.
“The hope of the authors of the current book fits well with all that can follow when teachers take up the dramatic arts. Such a path will almost always lead to learning and change for teachers and students alike who decide to walk a path that lets them use both feet as well as shape their capacity for learning and remembering.”
—Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University, USA
Arts-Based Research in Education
Foundations for Practice
Edited By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Richard Siegesmund
Copyright date 2018
Presenting readers with definitions and examples of arts-based educational research, this text identifies tensions, questions, and models in the field and provides guidance for both beginning and more experienced practice.
“This text demonstrates multiple forms of border crossings between disciplines, theories, methodologies, aesthetics, and ethics, which challenge traditional and positivist empiricism about knowledge making. What is specifically exciting about this text is that it focuses on those who engage with the materiality, rawness, and visceral quality of art-making without separating it from the enterprise of knowledge construction, as if those two things could ever be mutually exclusive.”
—Kakali Bhattachayra
Imperfect Tense
By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Copyright date 2016
This poetry collection is a meditation on language. The first section delves into Americans’ pursuit of Spanish as a second language. They take the literal grammar of the “imperfect” as a metaphor for the language acquisition process. The second section revolves around experiences as an English language and poetry teacher working with immigrant communities. The final section focuses on the languages of family.
“Wisdom, wit, and compassion characterize Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor’s first book of poems, Imperfect Tense.”
—Ann Fisher-Wirth
Full review: https://momeggreview.com/2016/05/30/imperfect-tense-by-melisa-cahnmann-taylor/
Teachers Act Up! Creating Multicultural Learning Communities Through Theatre
by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Mariana Souto-Manning
Copyright date 2010
If teachers want to create positive change in the lives of their students, then they must first be able to create positive change in their own lives. This book describes a powerful professional development approach that merges the scholarship of critical pedagogy with the Theatre of the Oppressed.
“Through play, fun, games, and theater, Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Mariana Souto-Manning recapture the joy and energy inherent—but too often forgotten—in teaching.”
—Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author of The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities
Arts-Based Research in Education
Foundation for Practice
Edited By Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Richard Siegesmund
Copyright date 2007
“Editors Cahnmann-Taylor and Siegesmund recruited an arresting array of contributors: paradigmatic pioneers, noted artist-scholars, as well as newcomers to the field. This volume condenses the history, unique features, social contributions, and controversy into a readable, scholarly, and practical text.”
—P. Smith Bell