About

Antero Garcia is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and President of the National Council of Teachers of English. His research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Garcia was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. He has authored or edited more than two dozen books about the possibilities of literacies, play, and civics in transforming schooling in America. His recent books include All Around the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology and Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom. Antero currently co-edits La Cuenta, an online publication centering the voices and perspectives of individuals labeled undocumented in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Pedagogy
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Linguistics
• Ecology
• Aesthetics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Re-reading the school bus as educational technology

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2026-03-19

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• Popular Culture: The Classically (White, Male) Treasured from Page to Screen to Page

  2026-03-13

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  Abstract Young adult (YA) texts drive movie creations, which also inspire reimaginations on the written page. Analysis of intersections within the pendulum of adaptations allows consideration of which texts are adapted and which stories are told and retold. This chapter explores which stories are affirmed and inherent messaging and values in these intersections from page to screen to page. Classically treasured stories are (re)adapted in YA literature, with more affirming possibilities. But even as YA literature more boldly imagines possibilities of reshaping and elevating our visions of pop culture icons, one may perceive problematic sequences in these stories centered in White tropes or situated in largely White enterprises. We dream of a new future for the intersections of YA literature and film which moves beyond White-centered stories, enterprises, discourses, and imagined worlds.

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• Introduction

  2025-05-12

  book-chapterSenior author

  The introduction offers a general overview of platforms, platformization, and the implications of each for literacy education. It argues that platform technologies dissolve familiar distinctions between digital and analog, agency and determinism, creating challenges for the ways to study, teach, practice, and talk about literacy. In response, it offers an ecological orientation for studying relations among literacies and the social, technical, and political-economic dimensions of platforms. It uses this framework to review emerging literature in the field of literacy studies that signals a shift toward engaging platform ecologies as well as to orient readers to the structure of the edited volume itself.

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• Same Storm, Different Boats

  2025-06-18

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  Five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global community continues to reflect on its educational impact, the inequities it exposed, and the need for strategies to build more resilient systems. Families, COVID, and Unequal Schooling in the US contributes to this reflective and forward-looking work by examining the central roles families played in maintaining academic learning and emotional well-being during school closures. This chapter introduces a collection of research-based family and community studies conducted during the early and middle phases of the COVID-19 quarantine. Grounded in contemporary insights from the science of learning and development and informed by an emerging transdisciplinary understanding of system resilience, these studies reveal the adaptive strategies families and communities employed to navigate remote learning. By highlighting the need for dynamic and equitable infrastructures, this volume lays the foundation for exploring how educational systems can be better designed for continual revitalization, expansion, and repair when families and communities are centered as collaborators.

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• Editors’ Introduction: Freedom is a Strong Seed: Transforming Civics through English Language Arts

  Research in the Teaching of English · 2025-11-01

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• Die Ausweitung von Digital Citizenship Education zum Anpacken schwieriger Themen

  Citizenship - Studien zur politischen Bildung · 2025-01-01

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• Argument as Architecture: Constructing an Alternative K–12 Writing Paradigm for Collective Civic Futures

  Research in the Teaching of English · 2025-05-01

  articleSenior author

  Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

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• Literacies in the Platform Society

  2025-05-12 · 3 citations

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• Other Suns

  2025-04-16

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• Teach like a Luddite

  Phi Delta Kappan · 2025-12-01

  articleSenior author

  In this article, Charles Logan, T. Philip Nichols, and Antero Garcia argue for resisting the uncritical adoption of “inevitable” automating technologies — such as AI — in schools. To theorize what forms this resistance might take, they turn to perhaps an unusual source: the Luddites. The 19th century textile workers were not anti-technology; they fought technologies used to de-professionalize and disempower them. Learning from the Luddites, they offer three approaches to a Luddite praxis in education: embracing strategic playfulness, developing localized tactics, and building networks of resistance. Technological change is a series of choices about power, work, and dignity — choices that can and should be contested.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nicole Mirra

  33 shared

• Ernest Morrell

  19 shared

• Robyn Seglem

  12 shared

• Thomas M. Philip

  University of California, Berkeley

  6 shared

• Jeremiah Kalir

  Indiana University Bloomington

  6 shared

• Shelbie Witte

  6 shared

• Jennifer S. Dail

  6 shared

• Emma Gargroetzi

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Urban Schooling

  University of California, Los Angeles