Community-Centered

As a student at Swarthmore College, he wrote a thesis on issues of language learning and bilingual education, which served him well after graduation when he became an ESL teacher, first in Philadelphia and then in the Bronx. It was in those classrooms where he began to ask the questions that would become the focus of his career as a researcher: Why are language skills of Latinx students so often classified as deficient? Why are those students sometimes categorized as “long-term English learners”? And why have the education policies that guide bilingual programs been imagined with a view to “fix” or “remediate” the problem of Latinx students’ language?

Flores explores these and other questions in Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press), his latest book and the culmination of almost 20 years of work. We spoke to him about its publication, his career trajectory, and his community-engaged scholarship, all of which he began as a way to serve his Latinx community.

Your book is, in many ways, a history of bilingual education; how did you get interested in the field?

In the last chapter, I reflect on how I ended up in bilingual education, because throughout the book, I’m critical of some of the history. I was interested in supporting Latinx students, and a lot of the research was specifically focused on bilingual education. I think that was what originally moved me into bilingual education. My trajectory into it was more about supporting that community and, even though most Latinx students aren’t in bilingual education programs and most aren’t classified as English learners, that was where most of the research was—and continues to be, in many ways. One of the things I discovered in my research was that one of the reasons so much of the research on Latinx students was in bilingual education was because of a range of governmental and philanthropic funds that framed the primary challenge of Latinx communities to be language, and the solution, therefore, being bilingual education. It is the framing of the challenges as primarily linguistic as opposed to structural that made possible the deficit perspectives that I am critical of in the book.

How did you move from being a classroom teacher to becoming an academic who studies the classroom?

As an ESL teacher in the Bronx, I expected that most of my students would have been fairly recent arrivals to the country, and yet, most of the students had been born in the US. Even though all of them identified as English dominant—and some of them didn’t even identify as Spanish speakers at all—they were classified as English learners in high school. I tried to use what I had learned in my teacher education program that framed these things with a distinction between “social language” and “academic language.” Social language, according to this definition, being the language that you learn to communicate in daily interactions. Academic language being, according to this framework, the “more complex language” that you need to learn in school. That was what I was taught. My job was to “fix” the gap between the fact that they didn’t have academic language in either English or Spanish. At some point, that began to feel icky, for lack of a better word. I saw them doing really innovative, interesting, creative things, oftentimes across English and Spanish, every day. I began to think, how is it possible for students who I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears are bilingual, to be framed as not proficient in any language? That was what moved me into doing my doctorate, and that’s really been the core question of my research agenda since.

And that is what eventually led to Becoming the System?

Yes, but it’s taken me a long time to get there. I started my doctorate in 2007, and the book came out last year, so there were lots of steps along the way. But that is eventually what moved me to say that we have to really understand the entire history of our field as it connects to broader histories of colonialism. The core tension I was trying to grapple with—which emerged from tensions in my life—is how to work to advocate for Latinx students within a system that was built in ways that are premised on their marginalization. . . . There had been histories of the field of bilingual education before, but I call mine a “genealogy” of the field, which has different assumptions. A history is trying to describe the major events. A genealogy is interested in looking at the major discourses framing the conversation. I am looking at the history to understand what discourses were being used to frame bilingual education. It didn’t develop in a vacuum, there were broader political forces, and how does that connect to the broader histories of our country and of the world? I, then, trace those discourses and the reconfigurations from the days of colonialism to the founding of bilingual education to the more contemporary context. It’s a very different way of thinking about the history of the field.

Your community-engaged research in Norristown, Pennsylvania, involves collaborating with a collective from Centro de Cultura Arte Trabajo y Educaçion (CCATE)—including local parents and students—to identify areas of research that would help improve educational outcomes for Latinx students. How did you come to that work?

Writing the book left me feeling a bit demoralized, because its essential argument is that, as Latinx professionals became incorporated into institutions of power, we inherited the same deficit ideologies of our community and are expected to see ourselves as needing to save and fix the communities that we come from. And that was a bummer. . . . Then, I just happened to get reconnected with Holly Link, GR’16, who did her dissertation work in Norristown—I was on her dissertation committee—showing that Latinx students were really not being served in the ways that she would like them to be served. She had spent the year since her graduation working in this community organization, CCATE, to develop an infrastructure of community engagement and community research that could be used to enact change in Norristown—to make it more responsive to the needs of the community. . . . We decided to collaborate and work together. The first year was really just getting to know the community and beginning to work through any power dynamics that exist between the university partners, which was me and my research team, and the community research partners. This year, we started piloting some tools, and we’re hoping to begin official data collection over the summer.

What specific research questions are you seeking to answer with them?

The core topic area is post-secondary readiness—Latinx youth feeling like they’re ready for life after they graduate, which can be going to college, going to a trade school, or going into the workforce.

What do you wish that the general public understood better about bilingual education?

There are so many different “publics.” I would like bilingual educators to better understand that the ideologies of bilingual education programs often mismatch students’ language practices. The assumption is that you should keep the languages strictly separated, but that isn’t how most bilingual people live. We need to incorporate students’ actual bilingual practices into our programs in more flexible ways. That’s a lot of the work that I do with teachers. I help them to think through how we can strategically cross the linguistic borders of Spanish and English, academic and non-academic, in ways that empower our students to develop voices as authors and public speakers. For the more “general public,” I think it’s important they understand what bilingual education’s goals are, which aren’t to keep students trapped in non-English language, which has oftentimes been the dominant ideology. It’s instead designed to help students become bilingual, which has all kinds of benefits—social, economic, and cultural ones. At the same time, I think it’s important to be careful in terms of how we approach opening up bilingual education to everyone. It’s great to give everyone opportunities to learn multiple languages. But the ways it has oftentimes been implemented in recent years hasn’t been with an equity focus. A lot of programs are opening in areas that are gentrifying, targeting more affluent communities and really forgetting about the more marginalized communities. I think for those who are coming from more privileged, affluent backgrounds, I would encourage them to think about how they can leverage that privilege to promote equity in these programs and to ensure that they’re not the only voices being heard. That’s what we’re trying to do in Norristown as a model of inclusion for all voices, all stakeholders to create projects together. Bilingual education is not a panacea, but it can be part of broader political struggles in support of Latinx communities.