Nelson Flores

Nelson Flores is an associate professor in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research 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. His current research projects include a longitudinal study of students in a dual language charter school in a predominately low-income Latinx area of Philadelphia that seeks to challenge deficit perspectives by documenting the complex linguistic practices these students engage in on a daily basis and a book project that examines the institutionalization of bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights era.

Dr. Flores began his career as an ESL teacher in Philadelphia and New York City public schools. Many of his students were categorized as "Long Term English Learners" who had been officially designated as English Learners for seven or more years. The disconnect between the deficit perspectives typically used to describe these students and the fluid bilingualism he observed them engaged in on a daily basis led him to pursue a Ph.D. in Urban Education from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Over the course of his research career, Dr. Flores has collaborated on several research projects focused on the education of racialized bilingual students in U.S. schools, including a study of students officially categorized as "Long Term English Learners" and a study of successful high schools serving large numbers of Latinx students. He also served as project director for the CUNY - New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals, a New York State Education Department initiative seeking to improve the educational outcomes of emergent bilingual students through an intensive seminar series for school leaders, combined with onsite support by CUNY faculty. His most recent collaboration has been with The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL), where he is studying the historical development of and contemporary implementation of standards-based reform for students officially classified as English Learners.

Dr. Flores' research has appeared in a range of journals including Educational Policy, Harvard Educational Review and TESOL Quarterly. He was also the recipient of the 2017 AERA Bilingual Education SIG Early Career Award, a 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the 2019 James Atlas Prize for Research on Language Planning and Policy in Educational Contexts. He also serves on several editorial boards including The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, and Multilingua.