Reading, Living, and Writing Bilingual Poetry as ScholARTistry in

Language Arts, Vol. 83 No. 4, March 2006

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Bilingual Poetry

I Am From

I am from MexicoI am from GuanajuatoI am from my home

I am from chickenI am from pizzaI am from strawberry cakeI am from white rice

I am from “limpia tu cuarto”I am from “no vallas”I am from “métate”I am from “vé a la tienda”

I am from Mom and DadI am from MishaI am from Mrs. LysaI am from my friends.

Daniella, 3rd grade, Ms. Aaron

Language arts educators who teachLatino English language learnersknow that part of our job is to helpstudents learn to distinguishbetween the vernacular varieties ofSpanish (or Mandarin, orPortuguese, or Swahili), Englishthey use at home, and the schoolvarieties of language expected inthe classroom and in otherprofessional and institutional con-texts. Bilingual or not, languagearts teachers know how to teachstudents to correct spelling, punctu-ation, and grammar according toprescribed, standard English norms.

But how many educators learn theart of the multiple languagesspoken by their Latino students?According to Freire (2000), mosteducators are trained in the “bank-

ing model” of education, depositingrules for standard language use intoour students’ “accounts.” Seldom dowe learn to listen to the music inbilingual diction or the creativity of

Reading, Living, and WritingBilingual Poetry as ScholARTistry in the Language Arts Classroom

Melisa CahnmannPoetry can be a reflective place for bilingual students and

their teachers to explore their linguistic and cultural

experiences.

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Latino students’ sentence structureor the content of their spoken andwritten words.

Daniella’s work is one example ofhow poetry can become a place forbilingual students and their teachersto explore a wide range of linguisticand cultural competencies. As apoet, educator, and scholar in thefield of bilingual education, I oftenvisit schools to give workshops anddemonstrations on the developmentof Latino students’ biliteracy.Increasingly, I use poetry as aresource with English languagelearners. When visiting Daniella’sthird-grade class, I gave the “I AmFrom” writing prompt (Rosaen,2003) where students, together withtheir teachers, write four stanzas:

1. I am from [familiar places]

2. I am from [familiar foods you eatwith your family]

3. I am from [familiar sayings orexpressions you hear at home]

4. I am from [people you love]

Daniella is proficient for her ageand grade level in Spanish andEnglish, but she is still learningboth. She wrote bilingually, includ-ing her mother’s voice in the thirdstanza: “limpia tu cuarto” (cleanyour room), “no vallas” (don’t go),“métate” (get inside), and “vé a latienda” (go to the store). In orderfor educators to use poetry in theclassroom to explore and embracethe diversity of language anddialect that Latino students likeDaniella bring to the classroom,they need to move beyond theirown anxieties about writing poetry.Poetry and the arts can beimportant tools for exploring differ-ent linguistic and cultural worlds.

My goal as a “scholARTist”(Neilsen, 2001) is to use poetry withstudents and teachers to betterunderstand the experiences of bilin-gual, Latino youth as they negotiate

multiple varieties of English andSpanish and the relationshipbetween language, culture, andpower. ScholARTistry is a hybridpractice that combines tools usedby the literary, visual, and/orperforming arts with tools used by

educators and other social scientiststo explore the human condition.Neilsen (2005) addresses three goalsof scholARTistry on her Web site:“to make academic writing an areawhere virtuosity and clarity are val-ued, to make educational researchan area where the arts arelegitimate inquiry, and to infusescholarship with the spirit ofcreative connection.” As a scholarin the field of bilingualism and anemerging poet, my scholARTistrycombines data gathered from open-ended interviews with bilingualyouth with my own experiences asa teacher, researcher, and creativewriter. I have rendered my findingson bilingualism and bilingual edu-cation in poetic form, creating lyri-cal portraits of what it means tocommunicate in more than one cul-ture and code.

I begin by sharing a poem thatexamines how I resolved tensionsbetween my language arts trainingin prestige varieties of Spanish andEnglish and my gradualacceptance, appreciation, and useof bilingual, vernacular communitynorms and identities. This poemand others I’ve written about bilin-gual and bicultural identity arebased on interviews with Latinoyouth. I share excerpts from these

interviews that have informed myown scholARTistry. Then I proposereading, writing, and living poetryas three scholARTistic approachesuseful to all English language artsteachers. Bilingual or not, all teach-ers can use poetry as a way to

meaningfully incorporate multicul-tural and multilingual resources intotheir classrooms and lives.

DISCOVERING THE VALUE ANDVALIDITY OF CODE-SWITCHING

I wrote “I Am That Good” inresponse to a poetry lesson planpublished on Bill Moyers’s “Foolingwith Words” Web site (Murphy,1999). The writing prompt, “Write apoem about a cultural encounterthat led to confusion or blunder andretell it in a conversational voice,”gave me an opportunity to explorethe dichotomy between theinstitutionally sanctioned bilingual-ism I experienced (developing Span-ish in foreign language classroomsin high school, college, and abroad)and the simultaneous, vernacularvarieties of bilingualism developedin many bilingual communities inthe U.S., especially among PuertoRicans in Philadelphia, which is thecontext for this poem:

I Am That Good

I can hold my bag in the crook of my elbow,

raise brows and in perfect Spanish, tell the vendor to take a hike

in a way that says if he’ll sell me three for that price I’ll return.

ScholARTistry is a hybrid practice that combines toolsused by the literary, visual, and/or performing arts

with tools used by educators and other socialscientists to explore the human condition.


I can sing happy birthday in Spanish and not just “feliz

cumpleaños” but the whole mañanitaswith a new, long tune

I now know by heart.

I can say no and mean sí and dance all night with the same

married, panzón, who buys me drinks and keeps his dirty manitos

off all the wrong places the whole night long.

I am so good that when I ordered breakfast at the Puerto Rican

diner in North Philly, huevos revueltos con papas fritas, I didn’t have to look

at the eggs and hashbrowns translation underneath,

but I did.

The way I laugh at the punchlines on time and still look at the English

on the screen’s bottom to see what all the other monolingual English

pobrecitos are missing, and laugh again.

So imagine my surprise when my scrambled eggs arrived

with French fries. 9am and soggy on the side

of my plate like a bad American joke.

I didn’t order this, I said in my most indignant, perfect

Spanish. And the waitress made herself larger, her tray

like a shield and said that I did.

I pulled out my English weapon and pointed to the translation.

“I ordered hash browns” I said to this girl, realizing all the times

I ordered huevos rancheros and tortilla española for breakfast—

but never in Veracruz, Madrid, or Buenos Aires had I ever said

this American word for breakfast potato.

I shrank to the time when I made my first public mistakes

with gender, the imperfect. Ashamed, I took off my costume

of big earrings and pouty lips and asked in my most innocent, non-native like way:

How do you say “hash browns?”

In her most perfect, Spanish-accented English, she said

“Papas fritas son Frensh fry,” as if she were explaining the rules of baseball

to a Phillies fan. “If das whatchu wan, chu say ‘hahsh brawn.’”

This poem is based on an actualexperience where a Latina waitressin Philadelphia helped meunderstand what Anzaldúa (1987)described as a bilingual languagefor a bilingual, Latino identity inthe U.S.:

For a people who are neither Span-ish nor live in a country in whichSpanish is the first language; for apeople who live in a country inwhich English is the reigning tonguebut who are not Anglo; for a peoplewho cannot entirely identify witheither standard (formal, Castillian)Spanish nor standard English, whatrecourse is left to them but to createtheir own language? A languagewhich they can connect their identityto, one capable of communicating therealities and values true tothemselves—a language with termsthat are neither español ni inglés,but both. (p. 55)

As a college graduate with a degreein Spanish and Latin AmericanStudies, I was unaware of thesebilingual norms when I wasrecruited to teach fourth-gradebilingual education in South CentralLos Angeles. I taught English as aSecond Language as well as Span-ish language arts, mathematics, andother core content subjects in text-book Spanish. I quickly learned theSpanish I’d acquired as a foreignlanguage student at college and asan exchange student in MexicoCity, while helpful during the hiringprocess, was of much less use whenteaching my fourth graders recentlyarrived from Mexico and CentralAmerica.

Spanish degree in hand, I initiallyperceived my students’ native lan-guage use as “broken,” eitherbecause some parents had limitedSpanish literacy or because of wide-spread borrowing of English wordsinto Spanish or code-switchingbetween Spanish and English. Mystudents mixed English words inSpanish sentences, inventing whatappeared to be a new hybridlanguage that wasn’t one or theother but both. Parquendo la trocawas a perfectly acceptable way tosay you were “parking your truck”in South Central, but it wouldn’thave held up in my Spanish coursesin college and would have beenlaughed at or misunderstood bymonolingual Spanish speakers inMexico City. Like many languagearts teachers, I felt an obligation to uphold “standard” language

norms—in this case, those set forthby the Spanish academy andassessed in the Spanish version ofstandardized exams my studentstook at the end of the year. Whatgood was studying subjects inSpanish if they used English loanwords like “hahsh brawn” or keptwriting the word for grandmotheraccording to their communitynorms, aguela, instead of the stan-dard spelling, abuela?

During my years as a bilingualteacher, my students repeatedlyasked to sharpear their pencils(instead of the “correct”—i.e., stan-dard form—sacar punta to saysharpen), despite my corrections. Iwent from frustrated to complacent


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I initially perceived mystudents’ nativelanguage use as

“broken.”

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to finally becoming somewhat pro-ficient in this bilingual variety,using this same barrio (Latinoworking class neighborhood) dic-tion to communicate with studentsand their families. “Mi’ijo, whatare you doing?” I would saytenderly to a fourth grader whowas throwing papelitos (papers)out from his desk. “Termina lo queestás haciendo (finish what you’redoing) or you’re going to have tostay with me after school!”

Rather than relying on the monolin-gual norms that guided my foreignlanguage study in high school andcollege, I was learning to use twocodes along with the bilingualnorms that operated in the commu-nities where my students lived.“Mi’ijo,” for example, was acommon term of endearmentamong Spanish speakinghouseholds, particularly those ofMexican origin or descent. I learnedthat bilingual adults often usedphrases in Spanish (e.g., “termina loque estás haciendo”) whenreprimanding children as a meansto get young people’s attention andshow them one meant serious busi-ness. Finally, as a partial insiderand outsider to the community, Ialso learned that using one word inSpanish in the context of anEnglish sentence, like “papelitos,”could be alternatively perceived asa gesture of solidarity orcondescension, depending on con-textual variables, including whowas speaking what to whom andwith what purpose. I began to ques-tion my monolingual norms, thosethat valued language separationand a one language = one nation =one literacy paradigm. In otherwords, the bilingual repertoireincludes communication resources(such as borrowing, code-switching,and bilingual lexical choices) thatcommunicate meaning, function,and identity in ways that are not

easily or adequately translated intoa singular code.

Living and working amongbilingual communities in the U.S.,I came to see that boundariesbetween codes are often blurred.However, it was reading poetry,fiction, and research on the bilin-gual experience that led me totruly value the bilingual norms

that operate among youth andadults in my school community,like sanctioning the contextualizeduse of borrowing English wordswith Spanish grammar (e.g.,parquear for “to park”) or thefunctional alternation betweenprestige and vernacular varietiesof English and Spanish to addressdifferent communication needs,abilities, and relationships.According to Rampton (1995), thewidespread notion that mono-lingualism is the ideal linguisticcondition helps to explain why newand mixed linguistic identities areseldom recognized by educators,policy makers, and researchers:

The bilingual whole might be morethan the sum of two monolingualparts. There has been an overwhelm-ing tendency to treat languages inthe bilingual repertoire as if theywere separate entities, ignoring theways in which they can combine tocreate new forms that are quite dis-tinct from monolingual use in eitherlanguage. (p. 338)

When I used these bilingual normsin the classroom, was I becoming“lazy,” content to speak and model“street Spanish” at school? Or was I

doing exactly what I had done whenI lived a summer in Salamanca,Spain—acquiring the norms of thespeech community in which I lived(like the familiar plural, vosotros),wanting to be accepted, loved, andunderstood by my Latino studentsand their families? ScholARTistryhelped me to find the answers tomany of these questions. Through

interviews with bilingual youth andcreative explorations of bilingualismthrough poetry and research, Iacquired strategies for makingexpressive use of all students’language resources as well as agreater understanding of manyLatino students’ desire to identifywith their bilingual vernacular aspart of group membership with otherbilingual speakers.

LISTENING TO BILINGUALSTUDENTS’ VOICES

In a study of Mexican-descent ado-lescents in Northern California (Cah-nmann, 1999), I interviewed aneighth-grader named Alvaro (pseu-donym) who was fluent in spokenSpanish and English but struggledwith English literacy at school.Alvaro proudly described hislanguage as something that “runsthrough my body,” an importantpart of his cultural and linguisticidentity:

If you’re bilingual and all that or Chi-cano, it like runs through you, runsthrough my body. It’s like that’s howyou talk, it’s like, “Hórale, por dóndevas? You’re going to the movies?

The widespread notion that monolingualism is theideal linguistic condition helps to explain why new

and mixed linguistic identities are seldom recognizedby educators, policy makers, and researchers.


Invítame, no seas un dummy, youknow!” [Hey, where are you going?You’re going to the movies? Inviteme, don’t be a dummy, you know!]

Alvaro demonstrated proficiencyand pride in his ability to alternatebetween two codes with bilingualpeers. While most U.S. Latino com-munity norms operate along a con-tinua of Spanish-English(Hornberger, 1989), monolingualcontexts expect bilinguals to haveperfectly balanced language sheetsin their brains; anything less isoften mistakenly seen as proof thatbilingualism is an inferior cognitivestate of being. Research by bilingualscholars such as Poplack (2000) andZentella (1997) have revealed thesophistication and skill required todraw on multiple codes for differentpurposes, depending upon the peo-ple, place, and purpose of anexchange. Despite these researchfindings, negative societal attitudestoward bilingual ways of communi-cating persist. Thus, it is notsurprising to find that whenbilingual youth are interviewedabout their language abilities, use,and attitudes, their reports aremixed with one part pride andanother part shame.

In an ethnographic study of PuertoRican ninth graders, another Latinastudent, Wilma, described the con-flict she felt between the bilingualnorms she used at home and themonolingual norms she wasexpected to follow at a school(Cahnmann, 2003). When Wilmawas asked if she knew about code-switching, she responded:

Oh yeah, Miss. I know a bunch ofwords like roofo (roof) and parkea(park). One time I was home and mymom used parkea and I said, “No,Mom, it’s estaciona el carro” (Stan-dard Spanish, “park the car”). Shetold me, “No te pongas comomierda!” (Wilma translated this as a

diplomatic, “Don’t get all high classon me!” instead of the more directtranslation, which was roughly,“Don’t act like a little *&#*!”)

When “strong forms” (Baker, 2001)of bilingual education, wherestudents’ native languages are usedas a medium of instruction, are notavailable to develop students’ fullbiliteracy, Latino youth begin toshift from Spanish to English domi-nance. Ultimately, many Latino stu-dents like Wilma and her peer, Catí,describe themselves as limited inboth their Spanish and English abil-ities, because they struggle to read,write, and speak prestige varietiesof both languages. While limitedconfidence and ability in Englishaffect school performance, limitedabilities in Spanish affect relation-ships with family members. Catí, aPuerto Rican ninth grader who hadreceptive but not productiveabilities in Spanish, described feel-ings of shame when communicatingwith her family (Cahnmann, 2001):

Yeah, I try [to learn Spanish]. MyMom will probably write in andspeak it, so I go home and I showher what it says and then she’llmake me read it so I’ll understand.My Grandma does the same thing. Idon’t go to Puerto Rico until I knowhow to speak Spanish. I can under-stand whatever they speak but I’mscared to speak it for the one factthat I [might] say something wrong.

Based on these interviews, I wrotethe poem “What You Are”(Cahnmann, 2000) from thecombined voices of these youth todramatize the mistrust that canoccur when Latino students areforced to choose between thelanguage of school and thelanguages of home. Persona poemsare opportunities to articulateanother point of view, “a means ofexploring both the inner world of

the person and the phenomenalworld outside, and of creating imag-inative relationships with theseworlds” (Johnson, 1990, p. 26).

What You Are

Between Halloween and Martin Luther King Day,

little Ramona forgot her language, started to leave it at home

the day her classmates laughed, the day she picked up

a dirty piece of paper when the teacher really said,

“RuhMOhnuh, you dropped your glove.”

That’s how it starts, the señoras say.When a piece of you drops off, and you

pick up something else instead.But nobody gives you that other piece

back.

You have to fight for it. Like Ramona’s cousin Gloria

who went back to the island when she was nineteen

because she was all-English, and the family said

she wasn’t Puerto Rican anymore, like she always thought she was.

She was cool and what the f--- man. She even thought

you made sancocho from a can!

No way, Gloria says to Ramona.Ain’t nobody gonna give you back your

cultureonce you leave it lying there like a

wrinkled piece of paper. You have to put your

name on it.Purple with plantain stains on your

fingers.Puerto Rican. Puerto Riqueño. If they ask

you,that’s what you are.

The testimonies from bilingualyouth have illustrated to me thatone’s degree of language expertiseis not fixed. Rather, bilingual abili-ties shift according to context,interlocutor, and subject. Theseyouths’ testimonies combined withpoetic explorations offer a form of


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scholARTistry that can help teach-ers “interrogate personal and cul-tural assumptions that have cometo be taken for granted” (Barone,2001, p. 26). Rather than onlyencouraging and correcting bilin-gual students’ English, a poeticsensibility can help bilingual andmonolingual teachers foster multi-literacy in their classrooms(Schwarzer, Haywood, & Lorenzen,2003). Reading, living, and writingpoetry are three of the manyscholARTistic ways teachers makethe continua of bilingualexperience in their classrooms andpersonal and professional livesvisible and valuable.

READING POEMS ON THEBILINGUAL EXPERIENCE

The act of reading poetry is anunderused resource for developingteachers’ abilities to attend deeplyto what students are saying andhow they say it. Sloan’s (2003)action research projects with grad-uate students at Queen’s Collegeprovided naturalistic evidence thatpoetry can make a difference inthe language and literacy develop-ment of both teachers andstudents. The challenge is forteachers to find opportunitiesthrough literature to more reflex-ively cross multiple cultural andlinguistic worlds.

Greater inclusion of poetry and fic-tion on the bilingual experience willcombat findings from a survey bythe National Endowment for theArts (NEA) reporting that literaryreading has declined dramaticallyamong all age groups over the past20 years, with only 12 percent ofrespondents reporting having readany poetry (Bradshaw & Nichols,2004). The report suggests thatdeclining reading rates may be par-ticularly significant among Latinopopulations. Increased exposure to

literature on the bilingualexperience will certainly influenceteachers’ understanding of diverselinguistic and cultural communitylife. Just as important, teachers’exposure to literature on the bilin-gual experience may also increasetheir use of it with Latino students,thus expanding interest and invest-ment in biliteracy.

Where do teachers and teacher edu-cators find poetry on the bilingualexperience? While more multi-genre resources are needed forteacher education, an edited anthol-ogy by Santa Ana (2004), TongueTied, is one volume that fills thisgap. The anthology includes poetry,prose, and scholarship about a widerange of bilingual and bidialectalexperiences, offering theperspectives of scholars as well asbilinguals themselves on what itmeans to grow up speaking, listen-ing, reading, and writing in morethan one code. Poetry collections byMartín Espada (2003), ChitraDivakaruni (2000), and MarilynChin (1994), among others, includemany poems on the bilingual–bicultural experience, and antholo-gies such as Cool Salsa (Carlson,1994) and Wáchale (Stavans, 2001)offer works by many bilingual writers that are vital for anylanguage arts educator’s bookshelf.Bilingual writers such as TrinidadSánchez, Jr. (1994) can draw read-ers into the condition of the “notme,” pulling us out of our ownracial, linguistic, and cultural posi-tions. Recently, I shared this poemwith a heterogeneous fourth-gradeclass of students whose native lan-guages included English, Bengali,Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, andJapanese. Despite the lack of trans-lation, the classroom teachers andstudents were all engaged by thefluent mix of Spanish and Englishand amused by the surprise Chicanoperspective at the end.

Why Am I So Brown?

A question Chicanitas sometimes askwhile others wonder: Why is the sky blueor the grass so green?

Why am I so Brown?

God made you brown, mi’jacolor bronce—color of your razaconnecting you to your raices,your story/historiaas you begin moving towards your future.

God made you brown, mi’jacolor bronce, beautiful/strong,reminding you of the goodnessde tu mamá, de tus abuelasy tus antepasados.

God made you brown, mi’jato wear as a crown for you are royalty—a princess, la raza nueva,the people of the sun.

It is the color of Chicana women—leaders/madres of Chicano warriorsluchando por la paz y la dignidadde la justicia de la nación, Aztlán!

God wants you to understand . . . brownis not a color . . . it is: a state of being a very human texturealive and full of song, celebrating—dancing to the new worldwhich is for everyone . . .

Finally, mi’jaGod made you brownbecause it is one of HER favorite colors!

Trinidad Sanchez

Poetry from the bilingual andbidialectal perspective often assumesconnections where our cultureassumes dichotomies andseparation—between English andSpanish, literary and vernacular,public and private. Inviting bilinguallanguage use in the context of read-ing and writing poetry recognizesthe all-too-often hidden resources ofstudents. When I worked with thismultilingual group of fourth graders,their teachers were enthusiasticabout the experience of writing thelanguages of home with their


students. One teacher, ElizabethConnell, described her experience:

I loved the way you encouraged us toinclude words that are often said in ourhomes. Silly phrases, commands, andexpressions in other languages madethe poems so much richer. Some of our

quietest students (also those for whomEnglish is not their first language) wereexcited to share such special wordswith their classmates. They are notoften given such opportunities. I wouldnot have thought to include two Frenchphrases that I use with my ownchildren each night at bedtime if you

had not specifically suggested this, but Ireally liked including those and they areimportant words in our home.

Reading poetry on the bilingualexperience brings us closer to thecultural and linguistic experiences ofothers as well as ourselves.


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Ada, Alma Flor, & Campoy, F. Isabel with Englishadaptations by Schertle, Alice. Pio Peep! Traditional Span-ish Nursery Rhymes. Illus. V. Escriva. (Harper, 2003).

This selection of rhymes from the rich tradition of Latinooral folklore is in both English and Spanish. The Englishversions are poetic re-creations of the originals.

Alarcon, Francisco X. Poems to Dream Together. Illus.P. Barragan. (Lee & Low, 2005).

Alarcon’s poems deliver a strong message in Spanish andEnglish about his dreams for children.

Carlson, Lori (Ed.). Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on GrowingUp Hispanic in the United States. (Holt, 1994).

An energetic collection of poems in English and Spanishthat features voices of familiar and lesser-known poets.Also see Carlson’s Red Hot Salsa (2005).

Delacre, Lulu. Arrorro, Mi Niño: Latino Lullabies and GentleGames. (Lee & Low, 2004).

These participatory finger play games, nursery rhymes, andlullabies are in English and Spanish.

Medina, Jane. The Dream on Blanca’s Wall. Illus. R. Casilla.(Boyds Mills, 2004).

Poems in English and Spanish describe the life and dreamsof a sixth-grade girl whose family has recently emigratedfrom Mexico to the United States.

Medina, Jane. My Name Is Jorge. Illus. F. V. Broeck. (BoydsMills, 1999).

The bilingual poems describe the struggles of a youngMexican boy to learn a new life and language in the U.S.

Mora, Pat. Confetti: Poems for Children. Illus. E. Sanchez.(Lee & Low, 1999).

The culture and life of the Southwest are captured in thesepoems from the point of view of a Mexican-American girl.Spanish words are woven throughout the poems.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. The Tree Is Older than You Are: A Bilin-gual Gathering of Poems and Stories from Mexico. (SimonPulse, 1998).

This bilingual anthology of poems and stories isdistinguished by illustrations from Mexican artists.

Orozco, Jose-Luis. Diez Deditos: Ten Little Fingers & OtherPlay Rhymes and Action Songs from Latin America. Illus.E. Kleven. (Puffin, 2002).

Poems, rhymes, and songs are presented in English andSpanish, along with musical arrangements for the songsand diagrams of the fingerplays for the rhymes. See alsotheir De Colores (1994) and Fiestas (2002).

Soto, Gary. Neighborhood Odes. Illus. D. Diaz. (Harcourt,1992).

Soto celebrates life in his Mexican-American communitywith poetry in which he naturally code-switches into Span-ish. Also see Canto Familiar (1995).

Stavans, Illan (Ed.). Wachale!: Poetry and Prose aboutGrowing Up Latino in America. (Cricket, 2001).

This anthology includes classic and modern poems andwritings in Spanish, English, and code-switching.

Wong, Janet. A Suitcase of Seaweed and Other Poems.(Margaret K. McElderry Books, 1996).

Some of these poems focus on Wong’s Korean and Chineseheritage in contrast with American language and culture.Also, see Wong’s Good Luck Gold (1994).

—Marilyn Carpenter

Poetry about Bilingual Experiences


ENGAGING IN BILINGUALCOMMUNITY LIFE

However many books and poems ateacher reads about the bilingualexperience, there is no replacementfor engaging oneself in bilingualcommunity life and language learn-ing. Becoming a language learnerfor the short or long term is oneway for teachers to understand theprocesses of second language acqui-sition first hand. Whether throughlanguage courses in the communityor immersion in a teacher develop-ment program abroad, teachersneed opportunities to feel theheadaches, misunderstandings, andmistakes of communicating in anon-native language.

Not only can we as educators findvalue in immersion in secondlanguage learning contexts in class-rooms and abroad, we can alsoengage more deeply in bilingual lifesurrounding our home and workcommunities. Communities thatlive, work, pray, and play in morethan one language are thrivingthroughout the United States. Edu-cators at all levels need professionaldevelopment opportunities to crossthe cultural and linguisticboundaries in their own backyards,regardless of their own languageproficiency. Crossing cultural andlinguistic worlds and spending timein local Latino community settingsis an important way for educatorsworking with Latino youth tounderstand the speech communitynorms our students bring with themto school. By attending socialevents—birthday parties, festivals,quinceñeras—and frequenting othercommunity contexts, educators canslowly become familiar with bilin-gual funds of knowledge (Moll,Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992).

The J & J flea market, “the largestin Georgia” (although I must haveseen a half a dozen signs for other

flea markets that make this sameclaim), is a place where many localLatino and African American fami-lies in my community go to buyproduce and other goods. My visitthere was an important source ofdiscovery in relation to my workwith Latino as well as AfricanAmerican communities with whomI work in Georgia classrooms.Before my visit to the flea market, Ididn’t understand an African Amer-ican third grader who wrote, “Myhouse is like a pond. There’s a

waterfall by the door.” Afterpuzzling over her meaning, I visitedthe flea market and wrote thefollowing piece of scholARTistry inresponse:

Teaching Poetry in Georgia Schools

My house is like a pond, she says. Is so pretty.I ask her to say it again.Can you say that again? Did you say “pond”?

Round body of water behind a house in Vermont

where a white girl skinny dips and geese make merry with picnics:How can a house be like a pond?

She tells me Grandmom bakes custard pies.She has a green carpet in the kitchen.Her daddy likes candy. There’s a waterfall

by the door.

I ask her to say it again.Can you say that again?Did you say “waterfall” by the door?

I don’t know if there is water by her house,

a splashing image in a cheap frame fromthe flea market,

or the sound of a neighbor’s pipes flushing through the wall.

She writes about rainbows and spells rain rian and bow

as a separate word and door with two r’s and one o

and she sits next to a boy who writes that he is from Mixeco.

Her skin is the color of pine bark; eyes framed in small gold globes like two

ponds filled with invisible life. I know how to live in

this school trailer,but I’m from a house like a jewel box.

She asks me to say it again.Can you say it again?Did you say “jewel box”? Thas nice.

When I saw framed, electric imagesof waterfalls and ponds at the fleamarket, I had a better understandingof what this third grader meant by“my house is like a pond.”ScholARTistry involves stepping outof our comfort zones and into thelives of our students. In this way, lit-erature on the bilingual experiencecomes to make more sense to us asmembers of the same, sharedcommunity.

WRITING LEADSTO TRANSFORMATIVEBILINGUAL PRACTICE

The act of writing helps one to doc-ument and interpret the pleasures,pains, and uncertainties of movingbetween different linguistic and cul-tural worlds from different socialand cultural positions. Readingabout bilingual experiences and par-ticipating in language learning andbilingual community life come alivethrough the practice of writingpoetry. However, results from theNEA survey indicate that almost noadults (1 percent) reported having

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Teachers needopportunities to feel

the headaches,misunderstandings,

and mistakes ofcommunicating in anon-native language.



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experienced any creative writingclass or lesson during the surveyyear (Bradshaw & Nichols, 2004). Inmy own experience, it is the act ofcreating and sharing poetry in writ-ing environments that allows me toexamine old questions about work-ing with bilingual youth in newways. When teachers create or jointheir own writing groups, they cre-ate a place to practice the art ofpoetry and the risk-takingnecessary to explore taboo subjectmatter, awkward feelings, andquirky language involved in cross-cultural experiences.

The products of teachers’scholARTistry need not be for pub-lication so much as for the cultiva-tion of personal growth throughexploration and critical reflection.However, making these poems pub-lic through creative writing groupsand publications for teachers’ andstudents’ work can increase publicdialogue about language learning,loss, and revitalization. Writingpoetry can also engage teachers inmulticultural introspection (Hidalgo,1993), recalling processes oflinguistic, cultural, and racial shiftthat may have occurred in theirown family histories. The followingpoem was written by an elementaryliteracy coach with whom I sharethe love of reading and writingpoetry. The poem, “Mixed Fit HimNicely,” explores the shift in anadult’s thinking as a result of herown and another child’s descriptionof biracial identity.

Mixed Fit Him Nicely

There I stood assuminga mother’s posture, hip shifted to the side on which you rested. We were surrounded by the endless smiles of the library shelves when

the boy with skin warm and brown asked if you were mixed. I found myself surprised, not because I thought him rude or

because you are not, in fact, mixed, but because I had really only thought of nuts and drinks and cut flowers that way. And shouldn’t I have considered your mixedness already? I looked at him, imagining him your age and at you, imagining you his.

You liked this boy and so did I. Mixed fit him nicely, so I tried it on you and smiled. One day, when you are newly teenaged and passing an afternoon

sideways reading the spines in the library, may yoube comfortable enough in the honey skin that holds you to speak to the motherof the baby in whose face you recognize yourself.

Jan Burkins

This poem is a moving example ofthe power of poetry to givelanguage to the unsayable. Burkinsis not bilingual, but she uses herown explorations of race as a wayto model literacy practices thatwork in the multicultural classroomby laying bare her own questions

and experience. As a complement tocurrent testing environments inclassrooms, she encourages teachersto explore poetry as a balance toother more test-driven instructionaltasks. Burkins has used whole pro-fessional days to work with teacherson their own writing in the beliefthat teachers who themselves writewill become better teachers of writ-ing. Teacher and poetry writer Eliz-abeth Connell shared thesereflections on writing poetry along-side her students:

I think all kids love to see that theirteachers are human—that we, too,have fears and difficulties and thatwe can work through those things.By sharing our own steps with writ-ing and letting kids know it is okayto make mistakes, we help them totake chances and try to model this—to try the new things right besidethem . . . to be nervous and vulnera-ble and excited all together!

More opportunities ought to beavailable for teachers to practicetheir own cultural introspectionthrough poetry and develop literacycurriculum as writers themselves.Whether through formalprofessional development effortssuch as The National WritingProject, poetry writing during pro-fessional development days, orinformal writing groups in livingrooms or cafés, teachers should beencouraged to seek their ownopportunities to develop asmulticultural writers.

POETRY’S PLACE IN CREATINGBILINGUAL COMMUNITY

Reading, living, and writing poetryare three scholARTistic ways tocross cultural and linguistic worldswith attention and dignity and givelanguage to what has often beenunsayable and thus unsaid. Thepractice of writing poetry is notabout recording what one alreadyknows, but, rather, about exploringwhat one does not yet know. Poemsinvite teachers and students to findfresh language, new insight, anddiscovery about themselves andothers.

If poetry is such a rich resource forteachers and students, why are theresuch limited numbers of Americanswho actively read or write poetry?Poet Ira Sadoff (2004) argued it maybe because in the United States, weare trained not to fail. I believe thisis especially true for teachers and

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ScholARTistry involvesstepping out of ourcomfort zones andinto the lives of our

students.


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researchers of language. We aretrained to be experts, consultants,knowers. However, crossingcultural and linguistic worlds inclassrooms and fieldwork requiresus to learn how to take risks and bewilling to embarrass ourselves andto direct our attention to theconflicts at stake—what Sadoff(2004) refers to as “the worry” inlife and in poetry.

In light of the anti-bilingual edu-cation sentiment across the coun-try as well as national legislation

promoting standardized tests inEnglish for immigrant childrenwithin the first three years of theirarrival, there is much to worryabout bilingual youth and theirchances of becoming fully biliter-ate lifelong readers and writers.Reading, living, and writing bilin-gual poetry can elucidate the goalof bilingual education—to providean educational environment wherestudents’ home languages and cul-tures are visible and valued asresources in the classroom.Through reading, living, and writ-ing bilingual poetry, “any teachercan foster multiliteracy in theclassroom without being a speakerof those languages” (Schwarzer,Haywood, & Lorenzen, 2003, p. 453).

If there is anything we havelearned from literacy andbilingualism in the twentieth cen-tury, it’s that poetry remains avital form of witness tonegotiations of language, culture,and power. As Ostriker (2000) hassaid of enduring forms of oppres-sion, “No solution is in sight, the

best we can do is listen to oneanother, and the privileged need tolisten harder” (p. 95). I believe theincreased exposure of Latinostudents and their teachers to lyri-cal portraits of what it means tocommunicate in more than oneculture and code offers excitingpossibilities to listen to diverseexperiences with attention anddignity, developing our students’full (bi)literacy potential. Reading,writing, and living poetry canhave implications for how we

teach our students, and how wesustain our creative lives asteacher–learners.

ReferencesAnzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands: The new

mestiza = La frontera. San Francisco:Spinsters/Aunt Lute.

Baker, C. (2001). Foundations of bilingualeducation and bilingualism. Clevedon,England: Multilingual Matters LTD.

Barone, T. (2001). Science, art, and the pre-dispositions of educational researchers.Educational Researcher, 30 (7), 24–28.

Bradshaw, T., & Nichols, B. (2004). Readingat risk: A survey of literary reading inAmerica (No. 46). Washington, D.C.:National Endowment for the Arts.

Cahnmann, M. (1999). “Like three doors—Spanish, English, and both. I’m going to both”: Language attitudes of earlyadolescent Mexican Americans. Texas Linguistic Forum: SALSA VI, 42, 13–24.

Cahnmann, M. (2000). What you are. RiverCity, 20 (2), 106.

Cahnmann, M. (2001) Shifting metaphors: Ofwar and reimagination in the bilingualclassroom. Unpublished doctoral disser-tation, University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia.

Cahnmann, M. (2003). To correct or not tocorrect bilingual students’ errors is aquestion of continua-ing reimagination.In N. Hornberger (Ed.), The continua ofbiliteracy (pp. 187–206). Clevedon,England: Multilingual Matters LTD.

Carlson, L. M. (1994). Cool salsa: Bilingualpoems on growing up Latino in the UnitedStates. New York: Holt.

Chin, M. (1994). The phoenix gone, the terraceempty. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed.

Divakaruni, C. B. (2000). Black candle: Poemsabout women from India, Pakistan, andBangladesh. Corvallis, OR: CALYX.

Espada, M. (2003). Alabanza: New andselected poems, 1982–2002. New York:Norton.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed.New York: Continuum.

Hidalgo, N. (1993). Multicultural teacherintrospection. In T. Perry & J. W. Fraser(Eds.), Freedom’s plow: Teaching in themulticultural classroom (pp. 99–105). New York: Routledge.

Hornberger, N. H. (1989). Continua of biliter-acy. Review of Educational Research, 59,271–296.

Johnson, D. M. (1990). Word weaving: A cre-ative approach to teaching and writingpoetry. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N.(1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching:Using a qualitative approach to connecthomes and classrooms. Theory into Prac-tice, 31, 132–141.

Murphy, P. E. (1999). Drop a poem into yourclass. Retrieved February 17, 2005, fromhttp://www.wnet.org/foolingwithwords/lesson3.html

Neilsen, L. (2001). Scribbler: Notes on writingand learning inquiry. In L. Neilsen, A. Cole, & G. J. Knowles (Eds.), The art ofwriting inquiry (pp. 253–272). Toronto:Backalong.

Neilsen, L. (2005). Homepage. RetrievedMarch 6, 2005, from http://www.iirc.mcgill.ca/collaborators/collabln.html

Ostriker, A. (2000). Dancing at the devil’sparty: Essays on poetry, politics, and theerotic. Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress.

Poplack, S. (2000). Sometimes I’ll start a sen-tence in Spanish y termino en espanol:Toward a typology of code-switching. InL. Wei (Ed.), The bilingualism reader (pp.221–256). New York: Routledge.

The practice of writing poetry is not about recordingwhat one already knows, but, rather, about exploring

what one does not yet know.


Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language andethnicity among adolescents. New York:Longman.

Sadoff, I. (2004). On sentiment andsentimentality: Poetry and the body.Paper presented at the MFA Program,Henniker, NH.

Sánchez, T., Jr. (1994). Why am I so brown?In L. M. Carlson (Ed.), Cool salsa: Bilingualpoems on growing up Latino in the UnitedStates. New York: Holt.

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Schwarzer, D., Haywood, A., & Lorenzen, C.(2003). Fostering multiliteracy in alinguistically diverse classroom.Language Arts, 80, 453–460.

Sloan, G. D. (2003). Give them poetry!: Aguide for sharing poetry with childrenK–8. New York: Teachers College Press.

Stavans, I. (2001). Wáchale!: Poetry andprose about growing up Latino in Amer-ica. Chicago: Cricket.

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Author Biography

Melisa (Misha) Cahnmann is assistantprofessor of language and literacy educa-tion in the College of Education at the Uni-versity of Georgia. She can be reached [email protected].

Established in 2001 by Donald H. Graves, this award annu-ally recognizes teachers in grades 1–6 who demonstrate anunderstanding of student improvement in the teaching ofwriting. The award is administered by the NCTE ElementarySection Steering Committee, which selects an award recip-ient from the portfolios and essays submitted during theyear.

Submission material information can be found on theNCTE Web site at http://www.ncte.org/elem/awards/gravesand must be postmarked no later than June 1, 2006.Results will be announced in September, and the awardwill be presented at the 2006 Annual Convention inNashville, Tennessee during the Elementary Get-Together.

CALL FOR 2006 DONALD H. GRAVES WRITING AWARD NOMINATIONS

NCTE’s Conference on English Education, in conjunctionwith the National Writing Project, offers this grant to sup-port teacher research projects inspired by the scholarshipof James Moffett. All K–12 classroom educators who teachat least three hours or three classes per day are eligible toapply for the grant. Moffett Award winners receive a cer-tificate, a monetary award (up to $1000) to be usedtoward implementation of the proposed project, and acopy of James Moffett’s last book, The UniversalSchoolhouse. Proposals will be judged on such criteria as

the strength of the connection to James Moffett’s scholar-ship and the perceived value and feasibility of theresearch. The deadline for nominations for the 2006Moffett Award is May 1, 2006. Winners will be notifiedin July 2006 and announced at the 2006 NCTE AnnualConvention in Nashville. Submit nominations to JamesMoffett Award, Kristen McGowan, NCTE, 1111 W. KenyonRoad, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. For more information, go tohttp://www.ncte.org/groups/cee/awards/moffett/108836.htm.

JAMES MOFFETT AWARD


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