Nelson Flores

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Flores examines the intersection of language, race, and the political economy in shaping U.S. educational policies and practices. He analyzes the historical origins of raciolinguistic ideologies that have framed the language practices of racialized communities as inherently deficient and in need of remediation. He also analyzes the ways that these raciolinguistic ideologies continue to be reproduced within contemporary bilingual education policies and practices.

Dr. Flores is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era. This book has four major objectives: (1) to situate the institutionalization of bilingual education within broader political struggles emerging in the late 1960s related to community control of schools and other institutions, (2) to examine the ways that the professionalization of bilingual education divorced it from these broader political struggles, (3) to trace the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education was both a precursor to contemporary neoliberal education reforms and has been shaped by the growing hegemony of neoliberalism in education, and (4) to conceptualize an alternative framing of bilingual education that re-centers political struggles against White supremacy.

Dr. Flores is also the principal investigator of a longitudinal study of students in a dual language charter school in a predominately low-income Latinx area of Philadelphia. This project seeks to challenge deficit perspectives by documenting the complex linguistic practices these students engage in on a daily basis as part of their lived experience residing in a long-standing bilingual community and attending a bilingual school. The major objective of this project is to use insights from an analysis of these metalinguistic conversations to develop tools for bilingual teachers to more effectively build on their rich linguistic practices that their students bring into the classroom.