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Literacy after Platformization
How are platform technologies remaking the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy? This strand of research maps the history of the “literacy” concept as it has stretched to accommodate changes in technology — media literacy, digital literacy, videogame literacy, data literacy, AI literacy, and so on — and the challenges associated with translating these “literacies” into educational practice. Projects also develop and test an alternate approach to media pedagogy, digital civic inquiry, and consider its relationship to disciplinary learning in the English Language Arts.
Key contributions — 6 works
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Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (Eds.) (2025). Literacies in the platform society: Histories, pedagogies, and possibilities. Routledge.
- Nichols, T.P., Thrall, A., Quiros, J., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). Speculative capture: Literacy after platformization. Reading Research Quarterly.
- Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2023). What relationship do we want with technology?: Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review.
- Nichols, T.P., & LeBlanc, R.J. (2021). Media education and the limits of ‘literacy’: Ecological orientations to performative platforms. Curriculum Inquiry.
- Dixon-Román, E., Nichols, T.P., & Nyame-Mensah, A. (2020). The racializing forces of/in AI educational technologies. Learning, Media, and Technology.
- Nichols, T.P., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2019). Assembling “digital literacies”: Contingent pasts, possible futures. Media and Communication.
Support
National Academy of Education
The Spencer Foundation
Baylor University
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Making Media LiteracyActive
Media literacy is invoked more than it is defined. This project historicizes the concept, showing how it surpassed competing terms to become the default framework for U.S. media pedagogy, and the assumptions it inherits from this history about media, literacy, and instruction. The project also examines how platform technologies make visible the limitations of the “literacy” idiom for making sense of connective media, from videogames to generative AI.
17 publications
Books
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Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (Eds.) (2025). Literacies in the platform society: Histories, pedagogies, and possibilities. Routledge.
Journal Articles
- Nichols, T.P., Thrall, A., Quiros, J., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). Speculative capture: Literacy after platformization. Reading Research Quarterly.
- Bacalja, A., Nichols, T.P., Robinson, B., Bhatt, I., Zomer, C., Nash, B., … Schnaider, K. (2024). Postdigital videogames literacies: Thinking with, through, and beyond James Gee's learning principles. Postdigital Science and Education.
- Nichols, T.P., & LeBlanc, R.J. (2021). Media education and the limits of ‘literacy’: Ecological orientations to performative platforms. Curriculum Inquiry.
- Nichols, T.P., & LeBlanc, R.J. (2020). Beyond apps: Digital literacy in a platform society. The Reading Teacher.
- Nichols, T.P., & Johnston, K. (2020). Rethinking ‘availability’ in multimodal composing: Frictions in digital design. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
- Dixon-Román, E., Nichols, T.P., & Nyame-Mensah, A. (2020). The racializing forces of/in AI educational technologies. Learning, Media, and Technology.
- Nichols, T.P., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2019). Assembling “digital literacies”: Contingent pasts, possible futures. Media and Communication.
Book Chapters
- Nichols, T.P. (forthcoming). Data literacies. In M. Winn & L. Winn (Eds.), Bloomsbury handbook of social justice in education. Bloomsbury Academic.
- Nichols, T.P., & Robinson, B. (forthcoming). Literacy in the age of datafication. In L. Pangrazio, A. Acker, M. Currie, & N. Kerssens (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of critical data literacies. Oxford University Press.
- Nichols, T.P. (2026). Beyond binaries: Gaming after “the digital.” In A. Bacalja, B. Robinson, & G. Dishon (Eds.), Gaming in a postdigital world: Towards new understandings of learning and life. Springer.
- Robinson, B., Wright, W., & Nichols, T.P. (2025). Playing with(in) platforms: A sociomaterial perspective on literacy and video games. In M. Sailors, V. Watson, J. Hoffman, & D. Alvermann (Eds.), Theories, Models, and Practices of Literacy (8th ed.). Routledge.
- Robinson, B., & Nichols, T.P. (in press). Layers, levels, scales: Theorizing platform-powered digital literacy automations. In J. Coiro, E. Forzani, M. Hagerman, C. Kiili, & J. Sparks (Eds.), International Handbook of Research in Digital Literacies. Routledge.
- Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & Garcia, A. (2023). After digital literacies: Media pedagogy for platform ecologies. In B. Williamson, J. Komljenovic, & K. Gulson (Eds.), 2024 World Yearbook of Education: Digitalization of education in the era of algorithms, automation, and artificial intelligence (pp. 212–226). Routledge.
- Nichols, T.P., Smith, A., Stornaiuolo, A., & Bulfin, S. (2021). Critical literacy, digital platforms, and datafication. In J.Z. Pandya, R. Mora, J. Alford, N.A. Golden, & R. de Roock (Eds.), International Handbook of Critical Literacy. Routledge.
Public Scholarship
Support
National Academy of Education
The Spencer Foundation
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Teaching Digital CitizensActive
Digital citizenship is often treated either as an aspirational identity students should strive for, or a set of skills they should acquire. This project starts from a different premise: by virtue of living in a world whose civic relations are shot through with digital intercessions, we are all already digital citizens. Viewed this way, the work of schools is not to cultivate “digital citizenship” in students but to investigate our shared condition of digital citizenship with them — through what we term digital civic inquiry. This project combines historical and field-based research on the place of such pedagogies in content-area learning.
18 publications
Journal Articles
- Thrall, A., Nichols, T.P., & Magill, K. (2024). Speculative frictions: Writing civic futures after AI. English Teaching: Practice & Critique.
- Robinson, B., Thrall, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2024). Critical perspectives on digital platforms in ELA teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (English).
- Stornaiuolo, A., Higgs, J., Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & de Roock, R. (2024). The platformization of writing instruction: Educational equity in new edtech ecologies. Review of Research in Education.
- Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2023). What relationship do we want with technology?: Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review.
- Krutka, D., Pleasants, J., & Nichols, T.P. (2023). Talking the technology talk. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Pangrazio, L., Stornaiuolo, A., Nichols, T.P., Garcia, A., & Philip, T. (2022). Datafication meets platformization: Materializing data processes in teaching and learning. Harvard Educational Review.
- Garcia, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2021). Digital platforms aren’t mere tools — they’re complex environments. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & Slomp, D. (2021). Writing machines: Formative assessment in the age of Big Data. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
- Nichols, T.P., & LeBlanc, R.J. (2020). Beyond apps: Digital literacy in a platform society. The Reading Teacher.
- Nichols, T.P., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2019). Assembling “digital literacies”: Contingent pasts, possible futures. Media and Communication.
- Nichols, T.P. (2012). From knowledge to wisdom: Critical evaluation in new literacy education. Voices from the Middle.
Reports & Whitepapers
Public Scholarship
- Thrall, A., Nichols, T.P., & Magill, K. (2025). Introducing digital civics club. Civics of Technology.
- Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2024). What relationships do we want with technology? Civics of Technology Blog.
- Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2024). Technoskeptical teaching across the content areas. Harvard Educational Review Voices in Education Blog.
- Thrall, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2024). There's a better way to teach digital citizenship. Education Week.
- Pleasants, J., Krutka, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2023). Introducing the technology education iceberg. Civics of Technology.
- Garcia, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2022). Why ‘delete Spotify’ should not be the main lesson for digital civics education. EdSource.
Support
TEXT
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The End(s) of English EducationActive · New
English education is regularly pronounced dead, or dying — “students can't read,” “students won't write,” “the discipline must adapt to new technologies.” Rather than accepting these diagnoses at face value, this project draws on historical and classroom-based research to ask what affirmative ends English education has, and might yet, serve, rather than what it must concede to stay relevant. It also examines the relationship between secondary and college English — and the assumptions each holds about the other — and works to sustain exchange across that divide.
5 publications
Journal Articles
- Sinykin, D., Winant, J., LeBlanc, R.J., & Nichols, T.P. (in press). Close reading is an argument. English Journal.
- LeBlanc, R.J., & Nichols, T.P. (2026). The specter of high school English. Post45.
- Smith, J., & Nichols, T.P. (2023). ‘Book choice’ and the affective economy of literacy. Journal of Literacy Research.
Book Chapters
- Nichols, T.P., Bryant, M., & Roach, K. (in press). Disciplinary literacies in platform ecologies. In B. Baker (Ed.), Research Handbook of Digital Literacies. Edward Elgar.
- Simon, R., Nichols, T.P., Edwards, W., & Campano, G. (2019). “There’s really a lot going on here”: Toward a cosmopolitics of reader-response. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Studies in Education. Routledge.
Governing EdTech
Educational technology is not just a set of tools but an infrastructure of ownership, extraction, and control. This strand of research explores how platform companies come to govern public education systems, how these arrangements vary across local and national contexts, and the conditions under which such technologies might themselves be governed. Projects also develop and study new technologies for synthesizing research evidence related to educational technology and methods for bringing practitioners into the edtech design process.
Key contributions — 5 works
- Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & Thrall, A. (2026). Parametrizing ‘the digital’: Education research methods for platform ecologies. Learning, Media, & Technology.
- Nichols, T.P., Logan, C., & Garcia, A. (2025). Generative AI and the (re)turn to Luddism. Learning, Media, and Technology.
- Nichols, T.P., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). Platform governance and education policy: Power and politics in emerging edtech ecologies. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
- Kerssens, N., Nichols, T.P., & Pangrazio, L. (2024). The Googlization(s) of education: Mapping platform intermediaries in public schools across three countries. Learning, Media, & Technology. 10.1080/17439884.2023.2258339
- Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform studies in education. Harvard Educational Review.
Support
National Academy of Education
The Spencer Foundation
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Platform GovernanceActive
This project examines how platform companies have become powerful de facto policy actors in educational systems, and how they might be made accountable to the purposes and values of public schooling. It follows the mechanisms through which platform dependencies are cultivated, the implications for educational privatization and student privacy, and the strategies available for intervening in these relations.
11 publications
Journal Articles
- Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & Thrall, A. (2026). Parametrizing ‘the digital’: Education research methods for platform ecologies. Learning, Media, & Technology.
- Nichols, T.P., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). Platform governance and education policy: Power and politics in emerging edtech ecologies. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
- Kerssens, N., Nichols, T.P., & Pangrazio, L. (2024). The Googlization(s) of education: Mapping platform intermediaries in public schools across three countries. Learning, Media, & Technology. 10.1080/17439884.2023.2258339
- Nichols, T.P., & Monea, A. (2022). De-escalating dataveillance in schools. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform studies in education. Harvard Educational Review.
- Scott, J., & Nichols, T.P. (2017). Learning analytics as assemblage: Criticality and contingency in online learning. Research in Education.
Book Chapters
Reports & Whitepapers
- Boninger, F., & Nichols, T.P. (2025). Fit for purpose? How today's commercial digital platforms subvert key goals of public education. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
- Nichols, T.P. (2024). NEPC review: Learning systems — Shaping the role of artificial intelligence in education (Bellwether, September 2024). Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
Public Scholarship
Support
Baylor University
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Participatory PlatformsActive
This project is a design-based study in which practicing teachers, education researchers, and software developers were brought together to collaboratively create, and study the use of, a resource-sharing platform. It attends to both the design process and the product, asking what changes when educators participate in a technology's inception and ongoing governance rather than receiving it as a ready-made solution.
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Luddite PedagogiesCompleted · 2023–2025
This project examines how contemporary critics and educators have invoked the Luddites — 19th century textile workers who rejected automating machinery they perceived to be socially damaging — as a model for present-day refusal. It treats educator resistance to automating technologies as a principled position rather than a reactive one, or an obstacle to innovation, and it traces earlier instances of this same argument to draw out lessons (and cautions) from previous efforts to rehabilitate the Luddite spirit.
5 publications
Journal Articles
- Nichols, T.P., Logan, C., & Garcia, A. (2025). Generative AI and the (re)turn to Luddism. Learning, Media, and Technology.
- Logan, C., Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2025). Teach like a Luddite. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Nichols, T.P. (2013). Feedback in an age of efficiency. Educational Leadership.
Public Scholarship
Support
Baylor University
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The Digital Education Research CommonsActive · New
This project involves the development of a searchable database that consolidates research on educational technology across disciplinary silos and media formats, paired with a curated digest that contextualizes new contributions to this database for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
Support
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Regulating EdtechActive · New
This project maps the financial and legal arrangements through which educational technologies enter schools and universities. It identifies where leverage over these arrangements exists and produces resources for educational institutions to use this leverage locally and at scale.
Infrastructures of Innovation
Why do promising educational innovations never seem to live up to hype? This strand of research examines how innovations — new technologies, evidence-based methods, measurement techniques, organizational models — are enacted at different scales of educational systems, and how the demands they impose on different stakeholders accumulate and create contradictions that stymie any linear sense of progress. Projects also develop resources for weighing these demands against the instructional purposes and democratic values that ought to guide public education's engagement with innovations-of-the-day.
Key contributions — 6 works
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Nichols, T.P. (2022). Building the Innovation School: Infrastructures for equity in today’s classrooms. Teachers College Press.
- Nichols, T.P., Maton, R., & Simon, E. (2023). Opposing innovations: Imaginaries of reform in the West Philadelphia Community Free School, 1970–1977. History of Education Quarterly.
- Nichols, T.P., Edgerton, A.K., & Desimone, L. (2021). “Smart power” in standards implementation after No Child Left Behind. American Journal of Education.
- Nichols, T.P., & Coleman, J.J. (2021). Feeling worlds: Affective imaginaries and the making of “democratic” literacy classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly.
- Nichols, T.P. (2020). Innovation from below: Infrastructure, design, and equity in literacy classroom makerspaces. Research in the Teaching of English.
- Desimone, L., Stornaiuolo, A., Flores, N., Edgerton, A., Pak, K., Nichols, T.P., Plummer, E., & Porter, A. (2019). Successes and the challenges of the “new” college and career readiness standards: Seven implementation trends. Educational Researcher.
Support
National Academy of Education
The Spencer Foundation
University of Pennsylvania
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Building the “Innovation” SchoolCompleted · 2014–2020
This project is a social history of “innovation” in urban school reform, based on three years of ethnographic research in an experimental Philadelphia high school and archival and oral history work on the district's longer history of innovative reform. It argues that innovations presented to schools as discrete solutions often introduce contradictory imperatives as they are layered together in practice, leaving teachers and students to reconcile them. From this analysis, it developed “innovation from below” as a framework for weighing the infrastructural changes an innovation requires against a school's larger commitments and instructional goals. The resulting book is used in teacher and school leader preparation programs, professional learning communities, and district central offices to inform decision-making related to new innovations.
16 publications
Books
Journal Articles
- Nichols, T.P., Maton, R., & Simon, E. (2023). Opposing innovations: Imaginaries of reform in the West Philadelphia Community Free School, 1970–1977. History of Education Quarterly.
- Nichols, T.P., & Coleman, J.J. (2021). Feeling worlds: Affective imaginaries and the making of “democratic” literacy classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly.
- Nichols, T.P. (2021). Innovating from the ground up. Educational Leadership.
- Ferguson, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2021). School sites and the haunting of history: Unmasking the past in field-based research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
- Nichols, T.P. (2020). Innovation from below: Infrastructure, design, and equity in literacy classroom makerspaces. Research in the Teaching of English.
- Salisbury, K., & Nichols, T.P. (2020). School makerspaces: Beyond the hype. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Maton, R., & Nichols, T.P. (2020). Mobilizing public alternative schools for post-neoliberal futures: Legacies of critical hope in Philadelphia and Toronto. Policy Futures in Education.
- Nichols, T.P., McGeehan, C., & Reed III, S.A. (2019). Composing proximity: Teaching strategic distance to high school writers. English Journal.
- Stornaiuolo, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2018). Making publics: Mobilizing audiences in high school makerspaces. Teachers College Record.
- Stornaiuolo, A., Nichols, T.P., & Vasudevan, V. (2018). Building spaces for learning in schools: Mapping the emergence of a literacy makerspace. English Teaching: Practice and Critique.
Book Chapters
- Stornaiuolo, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2020). Makerspaces in K–12 schools: Six key tensions. In J. Rowsell, C. McLean, & J. Marsh (Eds.), Making futures: Maker literacies and maker identities in the digital age. Routledge.
- Nichols, T.P., & Lui, D. (2019). Learning by doing: The tenuous alliance of the Maker Movement and education reform. In J. Huntsinger & A. Schrock (Eds.), Making our world: The hacker and maker movements in context. Peter Lang.
- Maton, R., & Nichols, T.P. (2017). Tracing tensions in humanization and market-based ideals: Philadelphia alternative education in past and present. In N. Bascia, M. Levin, & E. Fine (Eds.), Alternative schooling and student engagement: Democracy within bureaucracy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Public Scholarship
Support
Institute of Educational Sciences
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Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL)Completed · 2015–21
This project examined the implementation of college- and career-readiness standards across states, districts, and schools, as part of a $10 million research center funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences. The work attended, in particular, to the data technologies through which standards-based reform under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was enacted, and characterizes the era as, paradoxically, looser in its mandates than its predecessors yet, through those technologies, more closely monitored.
9 publications
Journal Articles
- Lentz, A., Stornaiuolo, A., Pak, K., Flores, N., Desimone, L., Nichols, T.P., Polikoff, M., & Porter, A. (2024). Changes that stick: Sustainable change in schools and classrooms is possible. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Nichols, T.P., Edgerton, A.K., & Desimone, L. (2021). “Smart power” in standards implementation after No Child Left Behind. American Journal of Education.
- Desimone, L., Stornaiuolo, A., Flores, N., Edgerton, A., Pak, K., Nichols, T.P., Plummer, E., & Porter, A. (2019). Successes and the challenges of the “new” college and career readiness standards: Seven implementation trends. Educational Researcher.
Reports & Whitepapers
- Polikoff, M.S., Desimone, L.M., Porter, A.C., Garet, M.S., Stornaiuolo, A., Pak, K., Flores, N., Smith, T.M., Song, M., Fuchs, L.S., Fuchs, D., & Nichols, T.P. (2022). The enduring struggle of standards-based reform: Lessons for a national center on college- and career-ready standards. Annenberg Institute and Brown University EdWorkingPapers, 22–622.
- Nichols, T.P., Plummer, E., Flores, N., Pak, K., Stornaiuolo, A., & Desimone, L. (2017). Year 1 state report: Massachusetts. Philadelphia, PA: The Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.
- Flores, N., Nichols, T.P., Pak, K., Plummer, E., Stornaiuolo, A., & Desimone, L. (2017). Year 1 state report: Texas. Philadelphia, PA: The Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.
- Edgerton, A., Flores, N., Nichols, T.P., Plummer, E., Pak, K., Stornaiuolo, A., & Desimone, L. (2017). Year 1 state report: California. Philadelphia, PA: The Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.
- Stornaiuolo, A., Flores, N., Nichols, T.P., Pak, K., Plummer, E., & Desimone, L. (2017). Year 1 state report: Ohio. Philadelphia, PA: The Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.
- Pak, K., Flores, N., Nichols, T.P., Plummer, E., Stornaiuolo, A., & Desimone, L. (2017). Year 1 state report: Kentucky. Philadelphia, PA: The Center for Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning.