ABSTRACT
Educators across the country grapple with ways to create affirming learning spaces for children and youth in the face of racial and social injustice. Crystal, a third grade dual language bilingual education (DLBE) teacher, teaches in a Latinx (im)migrant community in California. Crystal’s students question the ways their families’ (im)migration narratives are described and how their language practices are perceived. This chapter examines how Crystal develops a critical bilingual literacies lens that centers emergent bilingual students’ multiple literacies and translanguaging, and how she engages students in a temas, textos, and translanguaging approach to lesson design centering community and in a language study that helps inspire students to use their entire linguistic repertoire while normalizing translingual writing practices.
