Translanguaging Pedagogy and Testimonios: Reading and Teaching Latinx Children's Literature

Amidst xenophobia, censorship, and challenges to curricula that represent the global majority, it is necessary to advocate for and cultivate translanguaging literacies as we seek linguistic justice in all classrooms. In this article, we use translanguaging and testimonios as pedagogical tools rooted in social justice to explore the experiences of reading teachers and their students as they study the intersections of language and identity in Latinx children's literature. We detail the moves from a professional learning series centered on a “writing for desahogo” framework that integrates multimodal texts for reading and writing, and we put these into conversation with a district‐level application from the perspective of a Multilingual English Language Learner Service Administrator. We explain the origin of this collaboration between a researcher and a practitioner, describe lessons that use Latinx children's literature for reading and language analysis, and explain how to implement and adapt them for English‐language and bilingual classrooms. Highlighting translanguaging in our literature analysis and instructional design disrupts monolingual curricula, pedagogy, and language ideologies that have caused much harm to students and teachers for too long. Our liberating pedagogical approach has implications for teacher preparation, teacher professional development, and Latinx studies.