The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students’ writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent’s participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student’s writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students’ histories are inextricably linked.

While current research focuses on the marginalization and educational crises of students classified as English language learners—whom we identify as emergent bilinguals (García & Kleifgen, 2010)—this article highlights some of the contexts for learning that help these students thrive academically, culturally, and socially in two urban English classrooms. We explore the concept of translanguaging (García, 2009a; García & Li Wei, 2014) through the writing of two students who took up this practice as a challenge to coloniality in English classrooms. We also outline how two secondary teachers in New York City and Los Angeles adopted a translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). Through our analysis of two focal emergent bilingual students, we demonstrate how a translanguaging pedagogy—one that puts students’ language practices at the center and makes space for students to draw on their fluid linguistic and cultural resources at all times—is a necessary step forward in twenty-first-century English instruction. Our findings illustrate that the teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies disrupted the inherently monolingual and colonial tendencies of English classrooms through curricula that promoted metalinguistic awareness and reflection about their own linguistic and cultural identities, and integrated students’ diverse language practices to push back against colonialist ideologies. Our study adds to the nascent body of literature that translates theories of translanguaging into practical pedagogical approaches in secondary English classrooms.