T. Philip Nichols’s research while affiliated with Baylor University and other places

This chapter provides a systematic review of research published between 2006 and 2022 on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms in writing instruction. We theorize writing and platforms as complex ecologies, investigating the interplay of their relations and implications for educational equity. Our findings suggested three functional categories of AI platforms in writing instruction (assistive, assessment, and authentication) and a focus on the technical dimensions of platforms and their intersections with the cognitive dimensions of writing. Finally, we found a focus on equity notably absent from our corpus. Taken together, these findings suggest an agenda for equity-oriented research and pedagogy that confronts aspects of platform and writing environments that have, to date, been omitted from the empirical record.

This conceptual article examines the role of speculation in driving responses to generative AI platforms in literacy education and the implications for research, pedagogy, and practice. Our focus on “speculation” encompasses two meanings of the term – each of which has inspired lively lines of inquiry in literacy studies and transdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence, respectively. In the first sense, literacy scholars have recognized literacy education as a speculative project – one characterized by the cultivation of particular reading and writing practices in order to prefigure different imagined social futures. In the second sense, scholars of media and computational cultural studies have theorized a different kind of speculative logic that underwrites the design and functioning of AI platforms – one characterized by extrapolative prediction and algorithmic reasoning. Investigating the evolving relationship between these modes of speculation, we argue that the former has allowed literacy education to be uniquely susceptible to the influence of the latter; and likewise, that the latter exerts its influence in ways that remake the former in its image. We theorize this relation as a process of speculative capture , and we highlight its stakes for equitable literacy education. We then conclude by providing provocations for researchers and teachers that may be of use in preempting the collapse of these speculative formations into one another; and perhaps, in mobilizing a conception of the speculative that works productively toward alternative ethico‐political ends.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two. Design/methodology/approach This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework. Findings The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.” Practical implications Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them. Originality/value Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

This article develops a framework for understanding and analyzing the intermediary work of platform technologies, and their owners, as an emerging form of platform governance in educational systems. Our investigation is guided by two questions: (a) How do platform technologies shape policy by brokering relations among commercial, technical, and educational actors? And (b) how might these relations contribute to, or compromise, educational equity as they are folded into existing governance regimes? We address these questions by bringing together two critical orientations—critical policy analysis and critical platform studies—to map the power and politics of platformization in and across education systems.

Recently, talk of “fake news” – and its relation to wider epistemic crises, from climate denialism to the creep of global ethnonationalism – has renewed attention to media literacy in education. For some, revived discussions of media literacy offer protection (e.g., strategies for identifying and critiquing media bias and misinformation). For others, they offer empowerment (e.g. equipping youth to produce media messages that challenge misinformation or represent marginalized perspectives). In this article, we consider how such approaches, while often generative, retain a focus of media pedagogy that centers the actions of individual humans – namely, “literacies”, or practices associated with the interpretation or creation of media texts.

This article examines the familiar imperative for educators to cultivate affective attachments between students and reading—to foster love or ward off hate, for books. It considers the interplay of this affective economy with other “economies” of reading long theorized in literacy studies: the moral economy, promoting dominant social norms; and the political economy, prioritizing workers skilled to meet the needs of the state. We examine the relations among these economies through a study of “book choice”—practices intended to give students greater autonomy (and pleasure) in their reading. Using interviews and artifacts from three middle-school classrooms in the U.S. south using varied configurations of “book choice,” we report findings that suggest the affective aims of such programs often intermingled with moral and political economic directives. In conclusion, we suggest that attunement to these contradictions offers an alternate, and more capacious, orientation for literacy education and aesthetic response.

This article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of “innovation” at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental Office of Innovative Programs, the WPCFS stood at the crossroads of conflicting imperatives for “innovation.” These included: (1) institutional interests in advancing “humanizing” pedagogy; (2) Black activists’ interests in operating a community-controlled school for students of color in West Philadelphia; and (3) teachers’ interests in balancing their commitments to “humanizing” instruction and a surrounding community with different educational priorities. We highlight two instances where the frictions between these uses of “innovation” became pronounced in the WPCFS—debates over “free time” and the 1973 teachers’ strike. These incidents clarify how the burden of reconciling opposing innovations fell unevenly on the teachers and community members—often in ways that pitted the groups against one another—and exacerbated raced and classed inequalities in the school and district. While the account focuses on the 1960–1970s, we suggest that the WPCFS is relevant for us today, offering insights for the present into the longer discursive history of “innovation” as a lever for school reform, and into its impacts on educational equity.

In this contribution to the Platform Studies in Education symposium, Luci Pangrazio, Amy Stornaiuolo, T. Philip Nichols, Antero Garcia, and Thomas M. Philip explore how digital platforms can be used to build knowledge and understanding of datafication processes among teachers and students. The essay responds to the turn toward data-driven teaching and learning in education and argues that digital data is not only generated through national, state, and classroom-level assessments but also produced through the platform technologies that increasingly support all kinds of school operations. While much has been written about the promise of such technologies for schools, less is known about the role digital platforms play in constituting this data and how the platforms can be critically engaged to build knowledge and understanding of datafication processes in classrooms. This article explores these dynamics through three vignettes that investigate platforms as an interface for teaching and learning about data. In doing so, the essay speaks back to three interrelated properties of datafication—reduction, abstraction, and individualization— in ways that can be made visible for analysis, critique, and resistance in schools.

In this introductory essay in the “Platform Studies in Education” symposium, T. Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia consider the expanding role of platform technologies in teaching, learning, and administration and the contributions of education research to the emerging multidisciplinary literature of platform studies. Their essay outlines theoretical lineages that identify platforms not as standalone tools but as multisided markets linking their users to competing social, technical, and political-economic imperatives. It also highlights connections to related education research that demonstrates the impact of these conflicting imperatives for equitable student learning, teacher education, and policy making. The authors conclude by reflecting on the critical interventions that greater attention to platform relations in education might offer and the forms of coalitional work, across disciplinary and geographic borders, needed to realize these potentials.