About

Nelson Flores is a professor of educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) and is affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies and the Department of Linguistics. He serves as the director of the Ph.D. program in Educational Linguistics, faculty advisor for the Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, and chair of the Penn Faculty Senate Committee on Faculty and the Academic Mission. His research draws on archival, policy, and community-based methods to examine how ideas about language and race have been shaped over time in the United States and how these ideas influence contemporary educational debates. Dr. Flores is known for developing a raciolinguistic perspective, which explores how beliefs about language are deeply connected to histories of colonialism, and how these beliefs continue to impact educational practices and policies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Pedagogy
• Law
• Social Science
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Gender studies
• Cognitive psychology
• Art
• Epistemology
• Media studies

Selected publications

• A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Translanguaging

  2025-11-20 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, I explore the implications of adopting a raciolinguistic perspective to translanguaging. I begin by examining the colonial roots of the construction of linguistic homogeneity as the normative form of human communication that were shaped by raciolinguistic ideologies that frame racialized communities as having failed to master any homogenous code because of exceptional heterogeneity. I then offer translanguaging as a re-orientation to language that embraces heterogeneity in ways that reject these raciolinguistic ideologies. I use this as a point of entry for conceptualizing an approach to applied linguistics research that rejects essentializing racial and linguistic categories that presuppose that these categories are primordial and consistent across space and time by bringing attention to the locally situated emergence of racial and linguistic categories in ways that adapt to shifting political and economic conditions while working to maintain European colonial logics. I end by using this to critique the so-called “multilingual perspective” on translanguaging that essentializes linguistic categories in ways that fail to account for the colonial histories that produced these categories.

  PublisherDOI

• 12 Bilingualism for All or Just for the Rich and White? Introducing a Raciolinguistic Perspective to Dual Language Education

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-11-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  12 Bilingualism for All or Just for the Rich and White? Introducing a Raciolinguistic Perspective to Dual Language Education was published in Key Developments in Bilingual Education and Bilingualism on page 222.

  PublisherDOI

• Producing Deficiency and Erasing Colonialism in the Bilingual Education Act

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter situates the emergence of bilingual education as a viable policy option within culture of poverty discourses. At the core of these debates was the contention that their unique colonial history had produced cultural and linguistic deficiencies within Latinx communities that bilingual education was particularly well-positioned to remediate. This connected to a more general discourse associated with the culture of poverty that had been taken up in the United States with a primary focus on the African American community. As a result, bilingual education activists, in the process of being politically incorporated into the system, were accepting a Faustian bargain that bestowed on them individual proximity to whiteness in exchange for accepting that Latinx and other racialized communities were fundamentally broken and needed to be fixed.

  PublisherDOI

• 12. Nice White Parents and Dual Language Education

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2024-03-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Raciolinguistic Genealogy as Method

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter describes the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of a raciolinguistic genealogy. It lays out three components of a raciolinguistic genealogy. The first is a genealogical stance that denaturalizes racial categories through examining the historical context that led to their emergence. The second is a materialist framing that situates the construction of racial categories within the political and economic relations of power they were created to maintain. The third is a raciolinguistic perspective brings attention to the role of language ideologies in the production of racial difference. It then uses this framework as a point of entry for analyzing US history by examining the integral role that raciolinguistic ideologies have played in producing and maintaining white settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as in politically incorporating the demands of the Civil Rights movement in ways that maintained the racial status quo.

  PublisherDOI

• Nice White Parents and Dual Language Education

  Channel View Publications eBooks · 2024-03-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Bilingual Revolution Will Not Be Funded

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines the role of philanthropic funding in moderating demands made by bilingual education activists away from race radicalism and toward liberal multiculturalism. The first half of the chapter examines the Ford Foundation’s efforts to move Mexican American activists in the American Southwest away from supporting grassroots political mobilization toward adopting a technocratic approach that would eventually lead to the creation of National Council of La Raza (NCLR). The second half of the chapter examines the Ford Foundation’s efforts to move Puerto Rican activists in a similar direction through the funding of Aspira. Both efforts served to professionalize bilingual education advocacy in ways that removed it from lived reality of low-income Latinx communities. The growing cadre of Latinx professionals began to compete with one another for influence over the system and for the funding associated with promoting bilingual education.

  PublisherDOI

• Selling Bilingual Education, Inheriting Racial Inequality

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines the recent proliferation of dual-language education as an alternative to transitional bilingual education in response to assaults on bilingual education documented previously in the book. It pays particular attention to the ways that proponents of dual-language education have appropriated neoliberal multicultural discourses to justify expanding these programs by emphasizing the importance of parental choice and preparing students for the global economy. This is reflected in the discourse of Proposition 58 in California that rescinded the state’s ban on bilingual education. Yet, simply selling bilingual education as both a choice for white professional parents and as a solution to the challenges confronting “English language learners” does little to address the structural barriers confronting Latinxs and other racialized communities. This is illustrated through a case study of attempts to expand dual-language education in the School District of Philadelphia, which suggests the need to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to address racial inequities.

  PublisherDOI

• <b>Changes that stick</b>

  Phi Delta Kappan · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Many education leaders may wonder how to implement sustainable policy changes that will benefit youth, families, and the community. Arielle Lentz, Laura Desimone, Amy Stornaiuolo, Katie Pak, Nelson Flores, Philip Nichols, Morgan Polikoff, and Andy Porter share findings from school change efforts in more than 170 districts in five states. They present six key strategies based on this work, and they share examples of how districts employed the success factors of specificity, consistency, power, and stability to help build authority, which in turn led to successful implementation of new policies, curriculums, and professional learnings.

  PublisherDOI

• One School’s Journey through the Post–Civil Rights Era

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter uses Potter-Thomas Elementary School in Philadelphia as a case study for examining how the institutionalization of bilingual education was part of a broader reconfiguration of race that rose to ascendency in the post–Civil Rights era. It first examines the emergence of bilingual education within a broader move toward compensatory education in the 1960s. It then examines how educators at Potter-Thomas sought to challenge this compensatory approach through efforts at maintaining, rather than remediating, Puerto Rican culture at Potter-Thomas. It argues that while this was framed as oppositional to compensatory education, it relied on the same underlying logic that framed language as the primary challenge confronting the Puerto Rican community in ways that obscured broader structural barriers. Finally, it examines the ways that Potter-Thomas was a pioneer in what would become the modern accountability movement and the ways that this led the demise of its bilingual education program.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ofelia Garcı́a

  77 shared

• Neida Ahmad

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  64 shared

• Dan Heiman

  64 shared

• Cati de los Ríos

  64 shared

• María Teresa

  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

  64 shared

• María Cioè

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  64 shared

• Kathryn Henderson

  Alfred Health

  64 shared

• Carla García-Fernández

  University of North Texas

  64 shared

Education

• Ph.D, Urban Education

  City University of New York Graduate School and University Center

  2012

Awards & honors

• 2022 AERA Early Career Award
• 2020 CUNY Graduate Center Graduate of the Last Decade Award
• 2019 James Alatis Prize
• 2017 AERA Bilingual Education SIG Early Career Award
• 2017 Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship