Nelson Flores

Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by exp...

Silencing the Subaltern: Nation-State/Colonial Governmentality and Bilingual Education in the United States

This article introduces the concept of nation-state/colonial governmentality as a framework for analyzing the ways current language ideologies marginalize the language practices of subaltern populations. Specifically, the article focuses on the innate limitations of re-appropriating nation-state/colonial governmentality in an attempt to advocate for the subaltern. It offers the case of bilingual education in the United States to demonstrate this point. It argues that although the struggle for bilingual education in the United States re-appropriated nation-state/colonial governmentality in ways that advocated for language-minoritized populations, this re-appropriation was eventually reincorporated into hegemonic language ideologies that continue to reproduce colonial relations of power that erase the fluid language practices of language-minoritized students. The article ends with some recommendations for moving toward a language ideology that allows subaltern voices to be heard outside of colonial relations of power.

A Tale of Two Visions Hegemonic Whiteness and Bilingual Education

In this article, I examine two visions of bilingual education that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement: race radicalism and liberal multiculturalism. I argue that although proponents of both visions believed that bilingual education was necessary for empowering language-minoritized populations, race radicalism conceptualized this empowerment as liberation from hegemonic Whiteness while liberal multiculturalism conceptualized this empowerment as assimilation into hegemonic Whiteness. I then examine the ways that the institutionalization of bilingual education erased race radicalism through reframing the debate around whether these programs should be subtractive or additive. I conclude by arguing that this dominant framing of bilingual education debates continues to reproduce hegemonic Whiteness in ways that marginalize language-minoritized students.

Looking Holistically in a Climate of Partiality: Identities of Students Labeled Long-Term English Language Learners

In recent years there has been growing awareness about a sub-group of students labeled Long-Term English Language Learners (LTELLs). Our study seeks to show how students who fall within the LTELL category see themselves through the lens of their lived experiences as (emergent) bilinguals, students, family/community members and transnational individuals. Countering discourses which frame these students as deficient, we apply the discourse of partiality framework as a lens through which to better understand how these students perceive themselves via their languages, ethnic-connectivity and academic trajectories. We argue that the discourse around the label can be understood as a racial project that serves to perpetuate white supremacy through the marginalization of the language practices of communities of color. We conclude by exploring how schools can take a broader view of this population to create positive learning opportunities that build on who they are and how they see themselves.

Latino Emergent Bilingual Youth in High Schools: Transcaring Strategies for Academic Success

This article explores the results of a study of Latino youth in New York City public high schools. We propose that the common element among the schools is what we call here transcaring, an overarching culture of care that allows for the creation of third spaces within school, transcending traditional dichotomies around language, culture, place, and measurement found in many U.S. schools. We identify the different threads that make up transcaring strategies—translanguaging, transculturación, transcollaboration and transactions through dynamic assessments—focusing on each of its components by drawing examples from our data.

Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective , which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality) *

A Critical Review of Bilingual Education in the United States: From Basements and Pride to Boutiques and Profit

ABSTRACT In this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

How does size matter? The impact of the rise of small schools on Latinos and emergent bilinguals in New York City

Abstract Since the dawn of mayoral control in 2002, New York City high schools have undergone a major overhaul. Part of this reform effort has been the replacement of underperforming large high schools with new small high schools. This study more closely examines the effects of a transition to small high schools on students who are Latino and students who are emergent bilinguals (EBs). The data includes the demographic data from the New York State Department of Education Comprehensive Education Plan and the New York City Department of Education Progress Report for each school. This study finds that although a majority of Latinos and EBs continue to attend large schools of more than 1200 students, they are unevenly distributed across different school sizes. In addition, large high schools are far more likely to offer Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) programs. Findings also indicate that small schools of no more than 500 students have higher academic outcomes based on credit accumulation and higher four and six-year graduation rates for EBs than medium and large schools. These differences are most significant at schools with high EB and Latino student populations. The article concludes with a call for qualitative studies identifying successful practices for EBs across school sizes framed around more fluid notions of language support that move beyond the dichotomy of bilingual education vs. English as a second language (ESL).

From truncated to sociopolitical emergence: A critique of super-diversity in sociolinguistics

Abstract Sociolinguists have always been leaders in advocating for the legitimacy of all language practices. Recently, sociolinguists have begun to question whether frameworks that have historically been used as part of this advocacy are adequate for describing the language practices that have emerged as part of contemporary globalization. Some scholars have proposed super-diversity as an umbrella term to unite the project of developing a new sociolinguistics of globalization. Though we are sympathetic to the goals of developing new tools for sociolinguistic inquiry, we point to three limitations of the super-diversity literature: (a) its ahistorical outlook; (b) its lack of attention to neoliberalism; and (c) its inadvertent reification of normative assumptions about language. We suggest the concept of sociopolitical emergence as an approach to sociolinguistic research that adopts insights offered by the super-diversity literature while explicitly addressing these limitations. To illustrate this approach, we consider the case of a hypersegregated Spanish/English dual-language charter school in Philadelphia. This case study begins by situating the school within the history of Latinos in the United States and Philadelphia as well as within the contemporary neoliberal political economy. We then analyze emergent linguistic practices and emergent linguistic categories that have been produced within this historical and contemporary context in ways that resist the reification of normative assumptions about language.

The Promises and Limitations of a Psychological Approach to Understanding Immigration: A Review of Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, by Carola

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society is the latest book published by Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova. This book documents findings from The Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study (LISA), a 5-year study of approximately 400 immigrant children from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico between the ages of 9 and 14 (with approximately 80 from each of these areas included in the study). The study included yearly interviews with the students, along with parent interviews at the beginning and end of the study. In addition, macrolevel school demographic data along with classroom level data including participant grades and teacher evaluations were analyzed. This classroom level data was supplemented by the administration of the Woodcock Johnson Test of Achievement and the Bilingual Verbal Abilities test to each student at the third and fifth year of the study as well as ethnographic observations of several of the schools attended by study participants.