Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this article, we examine the historical emergence of the concept of \"digital literacy\" in education to consider how key insights from its past might be of use in addressing the ethical and political challenges now being raised by connective media and mobile technologies. While contemporary uses of digital literacy are broadly associated with access, evaluation, curation, and production of information in digital environments, we trace the concept's genealogy to a time before this tentative agreement was reached - when diverse scholarly lineages (e.g., computer literacy, information literacy, media literacy) were competing to shape the educational agenda for emerging communication technologies. Using assemblage theory, we map those meanings that have persisted in our present articulations of digital literacy, as well as those that were abandoned along the way. We demonstrate that our inherited conceptions of digital literacy have prioritized the interplay of users, devices, and content over earlier concerns about technical infrastructures and socio-economic relations. This legacy, we argue, contributes to digital literacy's inadequacies in addressing contemporary dilemmas related to surveillance, control, and profit motives in connective environments. We propose a multidimensional framework for understanding digital literacies that works to reintegrate some of these earlier concerns and conclude by considering how such an orientation might open pathways for education research and practice.

A growing research base has examined the possibilities of makerspaces in education; however, there has been little exploration of how such innovations are folded into formal school structures, like English language arts classrooms. This article addresses this by following theformation of literacy classroom makerspaces in the Innovation School-an urban public high school organized around principles of making. Using ethnographic research conducted over the school's first two years, it traces how teachers integrated making into literacy instruction and how the contours of classrooms were reshaped by making's ideals and assumptions. In particular, it focuses on resulting shifts in the infrastructures of literacy education-the often-invisible mechanisms that support, sustain or undermine reading and writing in classrooms. Findings show how the interoperability of these literacy infrastructures with those of making produced frictions that had uneven consequences for students, at times reproducing forms of deficitization that making education is often purported to ameliorate. These outcomes elucidate possibilities and challenges for educational equity when literacy learning is refashioned in the image of innovations like making. They are also instructive for understanding how educators might imagine \"innovation\" otherwise, wresting it from experts and entrepreneurs and relocating it in the lived dynamics of classrooms.

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.

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. [Author abstract]

The authors examined how the spaces and structures of literacy classrooms were organized, inhabited, and felt by teachers and students in a new project-based high school. The authors attended specifically to the political valence of these feelings: how educators characterized certain spatial arrangements (modular furniture and flexible seating) and curricular structures (asynchronous learning) as feeling democratic, in contrast to an authoritarianism that they associated with other instructional orders. The authors recognized that these descriptors, more than mere metaphors, were expressions of affective attachments that conditioned the classrooms that literacy educators worked to build—what the authors call affective imaginaries. These imaginaries, the authors argue, have material consequences both for how educators shape the world of the literacy classroom and for what practices are sanctioned, celebrated, and undermined therein. The authors drew from a three-year immersive ethnography in an urban public school to explore how educators imagined and shaped democratic literacy classrooms, how students worked within and against these imaginaries, and how resulting frictions impacted literacy learning in these classroom-worlds. Findings center on two interrelated tensions: (1) how infrastructures associated with democratic classrooms, at times, worked against other infrastructures on which students depended for literacy practice; and (2) how these incongruities led to new ways of surveilling students’ autonomy in their literacy learning. The authors conclude by considering how these findings might guide literacy educators not only in attending to the ostensive, normative, and performative dimensions of affective imaginaries in classrooms but also in opening alternate imaginaries, better attuned to the equitable flourishing of all students.

Antero Garcia and T. Philip Nichols explore how classrooms and schools must reframe their conceptions of technology from a focus on tools that serve specific purposes to a focus on platforms and their ecologies. In doing so, they argue, educational stakeholders should attend to three different dimensions of how technology is integrated in schools: the social uses of digital technologies, the design decisions that were made about these products, and the material resources that help make them operate. This approach requires educators to ask complicated questions about what technology does in schools and how to teach with and about it.

In November 2016, Jasmine, an eleventh-grade student, circulated a letter among her classmates (student names in this article are pseudonyms). Talk of the recent election had permeated their urban public high school, and many students expressed combinations of fear, anger, and numbness at the result. As many of you know, her letter began, Donald J. Trump will be the next president of the US, and I thought I'd let you know a couple of things.\" Jasmine proceeded to offer affirmation for the diverse identities that comprised the school community. Because the ability and will to bring personal histories into school is unevenly distributed-empowering some, while leaving others feeling exposed-English teachers face the challenge of navigating this tension. Educators must take seriously students' needs both for relevant curricula and for pedagogies that do not reproduce already existing vulnerability.

In this essay, Jacob Pleasants, Daniel G. Krutka, and T Philip Nichols outline a vision for how technology education can and ought to occur through the core subject areas of science, social studies, and English language arts. In their argument for the development of a technoskeptical stance for thinking critically and making informed decisions about technology, they discuss past and current efforts to address both the teaching and use of technology within the subject areas and possibilities for a deeper and more coherent technology education. To support that goal, they present the Technoskepticism Iceberg as a conceptual framework to identify the technical, psychosocial, and political dimensions of technology and highlight ways of thinking with greater depth about those dimensions.

T. Philip Nichols and Alexander Monea explore the spread of data-driven surveillance (i.e., dataveillance) technologies in schools, which are increasingly used as a strategy for mitigating safety risks. They argue that the sense of security schools derive from these technologies often comes at the cost of students’ actual well-being and privacy. Drawing on research with teachers and administrators, they highlight several ethical challenges dataveillance technologies raise as they are incorporated into classrooms. They conclude with suggestions for how educators might de-escalate their dependence on dataveillance without compromising students’ safety.

Multimodal composing using digital media has long emphasized forms of meaning making that extend beyond printed text to include a wider range of available semiotic resources. However, recent research has complicated this notion by highlighting how this availability does not follow inevitably from digital tools but arises from the interplay of their often invisible infrastructures (e.g., hardware, interfaces, algorithms, code). Using data from a technology‐rich humanities classroom, the authors explore three frictions that surfaced as students worked within and against these infrastructures to create a collaborative digital story. The authors show how attending to such frictions can open opportunities for inquiry and instruction related to the hidden infrastructures that condition multimodal composing in digital environments. Critical understandings of these infrastructures can support educators in creating more equitable conditions for multimodal literacy learning.