Shondel Nero

Shondel Nero is Professor of Language Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She is an applied linguist and critical discourse analyst whose research examines the politics, challenges, and strategies of educating students who speak and/or write in vernacular varieties of English, World Englishes, and Creoles. A native of Guyana and transnational scholar, Dr. Nero has extensively researched the linguistic and educational experiences of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in the US and the Caribbean as well as related issues on language and identity, and language education policy. She has authored four books, and her work has been published in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Linguistics and Education, World Englishes, and Language Policy. She is the inaugural recipient of the James E. Alatis Prize (2016) for an outstanding article on research in language policy and planning in educational contexts based on her work as a Fulbright scholar in Jamaica; and recipient of the Distinguished Guyanese Linguist Award by the Society for Caribbean Linguistics (2024).

Dr. Nero directs a study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic as a means of developing teachers' intercultural competence and culturally responsive pedagogy. She is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), and former Associate Editor of TESOL Journal. She and her co-author, Raul Lejano, won the AAAL Book Award (2022), the AERA Narrative Research SIG Outstanding Publication of the Year Award (2021) and the NYU Steinhardt Daniel E. Griffiths Research Award (2021) for their book, The Power of Narrative, Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science (Oxford University Press, 2020).