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This qualitative case study offers a window into one classroom in which one Latinx English language arts teacher and her newcomer high school students tapped into community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) as they engaged in literacy practices to resist oppression, denounce discrimination, and strive for social justice. We draw upon Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth (CCW) to understand how teachers can encourage resistance among historically marginalized students within the current racist and xenophobic political climate; and we examine how students respond to the teacher’s invitation to engage and develop their resistant capital through their writing. Data analyzed for this study include student letters, teacher interviews, and fieldnotes from one lesson, which was situated in a year-long ethnographic study. We found that the teacher cultivated resistant capital by tapping into students’ lived experiences to scrutinize oppressive rhetoric and persist in the face of adversity. Students seized the opportunity to resist the dominant anti-immigrant narrative by leveraging their resistant capital through counter-stories, assertions of experiential knowledge, and appeals to a moral imperative. Our study contributes to scholarship on CCW by exploring how CCW is utilized in a previously under-examined context and has implications for educators by offering examples of classroom practices that cultivate CCW and transform deficit discourses that threaten to impede academic success, especially among Latinx students.

Although TESOL educators often incorporate autobiographical narrative as pedagogy to develop language and literacy among language learners, research has paid little attention to how immigrant youths’ personal stories relate to advocacy and social justice. This article addresses this gap by investigating and theorizing how student advocacy developed in an autobiographical narrative project, the Immigrant Student Stories Project (ISSP). Using a positioning theoretical lens and an ethnographic approach, the authors focus on students’ participation and voices in their narratives and draw upon interviews and observational fieldnotes across ISSP contexts within and beyond one high school. The authors’ investigation of the ISSP examined what students do with their narratives and how they are positioned both in and outside of a classroom context, which the authors argue have consequences for language learning and social justice. The study found that learners are positioned as legitimate speakers, community members, and advocates when they are afforded opportunities to share their stories publicly, connect their stories with a larger community, and apply their stories as tools for advocacy. This study contributes to TESOL scholarship by exploring student advocacy through the lens of positioning theory and revealing how advocacy, language, and literacy can develop synergistically through storytelling.

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