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In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students’ uses of their linguistic repertoires and experiences of border-crossing enhanced their compositions. Through our study, we seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the combinations of student agency and teacher support that permit secondary school literacy learning to become a bridge from students’ past experience, existing knowledge, and everyday lifeworlds into work that is visible and valued in the world of school. More particularly, we offer border zones as an analytic framework for several dimensions of school literacy work for our focal students, and also as a potentially useful framework for curriculum and instruction.

This study compares and contrasts the selection and distribution of literary texts in the English programs of two diverse secondary schools, one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada. Analysis of the departments’ curriculum documents, state/provincial curriculum policies, and teacher interviews indicated that at both schools, Eurocentric and Anglo-centric literature dominated the curriculum of advanced courses. Analysis further demonstrated that texts of U.S. origin permeated the curriculum of advanced courses at both the U.S. and Canadian schools. A number of reasons for the similarities in the selection and distribution of literary texts across the two schools are considered, as well as the practical, cultural, and political implications of these curricular patterns. I argue in conclusion for a literature curriculum that reflects the historical and contemporary conditions of the transnational communities to which students belong. Educational stakeholders in local schools, policy makers, and teacher educators may contribute to the development and implementation of such a curriculum.