This reflection article reports on an eight-month critical ethnographic study in Bogotá, Colombia. I visited the classrooms of three English teachers and their secondary students from a diverse and marginalized community in the southwest part of the city. Data collected in the form of student focus groups and teacher interviews revealed how students and teachers attempted to transform their difficult living conditions. Teachers’ pedagogies provided the linguistic skills to discuss issues of injustice experienced by students in their communities and gave them hope to gain access to postgraduation academic opportunities. In this research process, I discovered that teachers create safe spaces for students to engage in meaningful English learning embedded in social justice and personal transformation pedagogies. Classroom tasks and projects developed social awareness in addressing community problems, which motivated students to change their socioeconomic conditions. Teachers hope that their pedagogical approaches inspire other teachers working in marginalized contexts to create lessons and projects that humanize relationships with communities.

This article uses a classroom experience to exemplify ways in which students as social beings learn English as a foreign language in Colombia and how the teacher uses trans[cultura]linguación. This is a process of making meaning during English-learning tasks while comparing specific linguistic variations as students learn about both their own culture and other people’s cultures. Borrowing from plurilingualism and translanguaging, I describe how a teacher attempts to use a social-justice approach to teaching English by valuing her students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires. I conclude by outlining the implications this has for proposing a paradigm shift from monolithic frameworks of learning language(s) to more dynamic ones in which students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds are deployed as a platform for addressing issues that are relevant to their communities.

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This paper describes how a collaborative action research project implemented in an underprivileged high school in Bogotá helped an English teacher and her students discuss issues of social justice with a special focus on bullying. It also discusses how the English teacher used her class to connect global and local issues to sensitize students to their own social inequalities. To do this, the teacher used social justice, critical peace education, and globalization as a framework that guided her research and practices. The students, the teacher, and I, as a researcher, collaborated to cocreate lessons whereby students were conscientized about normalized aggression in the school. The findings of this research suggest the following (a) students became more sensitive to and aware of the violent culture that existed in the school, (b) the activities empowered them to become advocates for social change, and (c) the actions taken translated into the community becoming central as praxis. I conclude that the English classroom has the capacity for social transformation as it allows for alternative pedagogical approaches targetting the students’ needs.