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 politicaleconomic 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.
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T. Philip Nichols (
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8648-1276) is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Baylor University. He studies how science and technology condition the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy and the wider implications of such relationships for equitable public education. His work appears in academic and practitioner journals, including
Teachers College Record,
Learning, Media, and Technology, and
Phi Delta Kappan, as well as magazines like
The Atlantic and
Logic. He is the author of
Building the Innovation School: Infrastructures for Equity in Today’s Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2022).
Antero Garcia (
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8417-4723) is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, where he is also the faculty codirector of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. Prior to completing his PhD, Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Based on his research, which explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in education research, Antero codesigned the Critical Design and Gaming School, a public high school in Los Angeles. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America.