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Literacy after Platformization
How are platform technologies remaking the ways we practise, teach, and talk about literacy? This strand attends to the interests and imperatives that drive connective media and their implications for equitable literacy education; to how datafication and algorithmic reasoning are reshaping popular understandings of “literacy” itself; and to what alternative orientations for literacy pedagogy might help in understanding, analyzing, and intervening in the conditions platforms create.
25 framing pieces across the strand
- 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.
- Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (Eds.) (2025). Literacies in the platform society: Histories, pedagogies, and possibilities. Routledge.
- 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.
- 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.
- Nichols, T.P., Thrall, A., Quiros, J., & Dixon-Román, E. (2024). Speculative capture: Literacy after platformization. Reading Research Quarterly.
- 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).
- 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., & 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. (2023). The limits of ‘digital literacy.’ Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.
- LeBlanc, R., Aguilera, E., Burriss, S., de Roock, R., Fassbender, W., Monea, B., Nichols, T.P., Pandya, J.Z., Robinson, B., Smith, A., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2023). Digital platforms and literacy education. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
- 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.
- Nichols, T.P., & LeBlanc, R.J. (2021). Media education and the limits of ‘literacy’: Ecological orientations to performative platforms. Curriculum Inquiry.
- 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.
- 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.
- Campano, G., Nichols, T.P., & Player, G. (2020). Multimodal critical inquiry: Nurturing decolonial imaginaries. In E. Moje, P. Afflerbach, P. Enciso, & N.K. Lesaux (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. V (pp. 137–152). Routledge.
- 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.
- Stornaiuolo, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2019). Cosmopolitanism and education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.252
- Nichols, T.P., & O’Sullivan, B. (2019). Classroom cosmopolitics: Worldbuilding for mutual flourishing. In K. Lenters & M. McDermott (Eds.), Affect, embodiment, and place in critical literacy: Assembling theory and practice. Routledge.
- Nichols, T.P., & Campano, G. (2017). Post-humanism and literacy studies. Language Arts.
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The Spencer Foundation
Baylor University
Making Media LiteracyActive
Media literacy is invoked constantly and defined loosely. This project asks what the term has been made to mean, who gets to define it, and what happens to it when the media in question are platforms rather than texts.
Support
The Spencer Foundation
Baylor University
Teaching Digital CitizensActive
Students are already digital citizens, by virtue of living in a world shot through with digital intercessions. The question is not whether to prepare them for that condition but what and how we teach people already inside it — and how to invite them into inquiry about the condition itself. Much of this work is developed with teachers through the Civics of Technology collaborative.
12 publications
- Thrall, A., Nichols, T.P., & Magill, K. (2025). Introducing digital civics club. Civics of Technology.
- Thrall, A., Logan, C., & Nichols, T.P. (2025). Being a 'Civics of Tech' parent: Commitments. 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.
- Thrall, A., Nichols, T.P., & Magill, K. (2024). Speculative frictions: Writing civic futures after AI. English Teaching: Practice & Critique.
- 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.
- 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.
- Garcia, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2021). Digital platforms aren’t mere tools — they’re complex environments. Phi Delta Kappan.
- Nichols, T.P. (2012). From knowledge to wisdom: Critical evaluation in new literacy education. Voices from the Middle.
Support
Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
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The End(s) of EnglishActive
English is regularly reported to be dead or dying — students can't read; the subject must be updated to keep pace with new technology. This project takes the diagnosis seriously without accepting its terms, asking what English education ought to be in a changing ecosystem rather than what it must concede.
5 publications
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 only a set of tools but an infrastructure of ownership, procurement, and control. This strand maps that territory: what edtech is made of, how it comes to govern education, and how it might itself be governed — following the intermediaries through which platform dependence takes hold, the data schools are made to generate, and the arrangements that treat private systems as public infrastructure.
5 framing pieces across the strand
- Nichols, T.P., LeBlanc, R.J., & Thrall, A. (2026). Parametrizing ‘the digital’: Education research methods for platform ecologies. Learning, Media, & Technology.
- 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.
- Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform studies in education. Harvard Educational Review.
- Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2022). Platform studies in education. Harvard Educational Review Voices in Education Blog.
Support
The Spencer Foundation
Baylor University
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Platform GovernanceActive
How platform companies come to govern public schooling — through vendor relationships and intermediaries, through the data schools generate, and through policy arrangements that outsource public functions to private systems. Includes comparative work across three national school systems.
6 publications
- Nichols, T.P., & Thrall, A. (2025). Platformed privatization: Data, technology, and the changing infrastructure of educational governance. In C. Fontdevila, H. Jabbar, A. Verger, & A. Zancajo (Eds.), Research handbook on education privatization and marketization. Edward Elgar.
- 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). Twitter sale shows us why educational technologies should be accountable to schools. EdSource.
- Scott, J., & Nichols, T.P. (2017). Learning analytics as assemblage: Criticality and contingency in online learning. Research in Education.
Support
Baylor University
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Participatory PlatformsActive
If platform logic is the problem, what does an alternative actually look like when you have to build and run one? This project designs and studies online professional learning organized around reciprocity rather than extraction.
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Refusing AutomationActive
Orientations to technology that do not take AI and automation as inevitable. The Luddite inheritance read not as technophobia but as a tradition of asking who a technology serves and on whose terms it arrives.
5 publications
- Logan, C., Nichols, T.P., & Garcia, A. (2026). Our time amongst the Luddites. Civics of Technology.
- 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.
- Garcia, A., Logan, C., & Nichols, T.P. (2024). Inspiration from the Luddites: On Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Nichols, T.P. (2013). Feedback in an age of efficiency. Educational Leadership.
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Baylor University
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The Digital Education Research CommonsActive · New
A new project on what regulation of educational technology could look like — what instruments exist, which have been tried, and what schools and states can do that does not depend on vendor goodwill.
Publications forthcoming.
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Regulating EdTechActive · New
A new project on what regulation of educational technology could look like — what instruments exist, which have been tried, and what schools and states can do that does not depend on vendor goodwill.
Publications forthcoming.
Enacting Innovation
Reforms arrive in schools as plans and leave as something else. This strand follows what happens in between: how innovations — whether a design-thinking curriculum or a set of state standards — get enacted on the ground, and how the people who have to enact them reconcile the demands with their own purposes.
1 framing pieces across the strand
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National Academy of Education
The Spencer Foundation
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Making “Innovation”Completed · 2014–2020
A social history of “innovation” in urban school reform, and what it does to literacy education. Pairing archival and ethnographic research, the study traced the changing meanings of innovation — from Cold War science and political economy to present associations with STEM and entrepreneurship — and mapped how those shifts inflect the spatial, technological, and instructional order of schools. It is grounded in Philadelphia, from the founding of a district Innovation Office in the mid-1960s through a nine-month ethnography of a non-selective high school organized around making and design thinking.
15 publications
- 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., Maton, R., & Simon, E. (2023). Opposing innovations: Imaginaries of reform in the West Philadelphia Community Free School, 1970–1977. History of Education Quarterly HEQ&A Podcast.
- Nichols, T.P. (2022). Building the Innovation School: Infrastructures for equity in today’s classrooms. Teachers College Press.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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., & 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Institute of Education Sciences
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C-SAILCompleted · 2015–2021
The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning examined how college- and career-readiness standards were implemented within and across states, and what supported teachers and administrators in meeting the needs of diverse learners. For the project's first two years I oversaw the partnership with Massachusetts — conducting interviews on assessment, professional development, curriculum, and outreach — and contributed to cross-state analysis.
9 publications
- 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.
- 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., 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.
- 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.