Beyond the Credential: An Intellectual Catalyst

When I decided to pursue a doctorate, I wanted to do more than just get another credential or professional title. This is the only degree I pursued that did not have a state K-12 teaching certificate because I wanted it to be different. I started this journey in 2014 when I was serving as an assistant principal. Even though life led to me taking a break in my doctoral journey, I always knew that I wanted to bring greater intellectual depth and coherence to work I had already been doing for many years as a teacher, department chair, technology coach, assistant principal.

The doctoral courses, fellow students and professors served as a catalyst that led me to be more prepared and thoughtful in my various roles including being a district leader, writer, and advocate for public education. I had accumulated considerable practical experiences, but I wanted the theoretical grounding, research skills, and scholarly discipline to examine that experience more carefully. I hoped doctoral study would help me connect areas that are too often treated separately, including technology, curriculum, learning, policy, equity, leadership, and the broader purposes of public education.

Four Dimensions of Purposeful Integration

Personally, I wanted to challenge myself by completing a sustained and meaningful intellectual project. I also wanted to bring together parts of my professional identity that had sometimes felt fragmented. I did not see myself only as a technology director, curriculum leader, writer, former classroom teacher, or researcher. I wanted to understand how those identities could inform one another. In that sense, pursuing the doctorate was not an attempt to reinvent myself. It was an attempt to integrate the different strands of my experience into a more coherent sense of purpose.

Socially, I hoped to contribute to better public conversations about education and technology. Too many technology decisions are driven by novelty, efficiency, fear, commercial pressure, or the assumption that technological or curricular change is inevitable. I wanted to help educators and school leaders ask more fundamental questions. What kind of learning does a technology support? What does it bypass? Who benefits from its use? Who bears the costs? What happens to student agency, educator judgment, privacy, equity, and democratic participation when various technologies and curricular choices are used with students? I wanted my scholarship to be useful beyond the university and to contribute to the work of teachers, administrators, policymakers, school boards, and communities.

Academically, I wanted to understand more deeply how technologies, media, and pedagogy shape human thought, language, authorship, and learning. Neil Postman became an important intellectual influence because he insisted that every technology involves tradeoffs, carries assumptions, distributes benefits and burdens unevenly, and eventually begins to appear natural or inevitable. Walter Ong’s work in media ecology gave me another way to understand how transformations in communication can reorganize consciousness itself. These influences eventually contributed to my work on tertiary algorithmicity and pedagogical friction. They helped me investigate what happens when algorithmic systems no longer just distribute or organize human expression, but increasingly generate it with us and for us.

Professionally, I hoped the doctorate would strengthen my ability to lead responsibly at the intersection of infrastructure, curriculum, and public purpose. I wanted to become a better district leader, writer, teacher of adults, policy advocate, and public scholar. I did not believe that earning a doctorate would automatically grant me authority. I hoped the process would teach me to make better arguments, examine evidence more carefully, recognize the limitations of my claims, and listen more closely to perspectives beyond my own experience.

During the last part of my doctoral absence before I returned to the coursework, I completed my first book, AI Goes to School. This led to many new opportunities to speak with organizations and districts as well as provided the momentum to lead me to my current role as the Director of Innovation and Technology for Beach Park District 3 after many years of serving as both the district instructional technology and social studies curriculum leader for Maywood 89.

The Epistemic Transformation: Formulating Better Questions

My goals and motivations have changed over the past few years. When I began, I think I hoped doctoral study would help me find firmer answers. Instead, it has taught me to formulate better questions and remain with uncertainty longer. My focus has also shifted from technology integration toward the deeper conditions under which technology supports or undermines learning. Generative AI accelerated that change. The central question is no longer simply whether schools should use AI. The more important question is what kinds of intellectual, rhetorical, and human work AI helps learners enter, and what kinds of work it allows them to avoid.

One of my most important realities of our current milieu has been that the opposite of difficulty is not necessarily learning, and the removal of friction is not necessarily progress. Some friction is productive because it helps students develop understanding, judgment, authorship, resilience, and agency. Other friction is exclusionary because it prevents students from participating without serving a meaningful learning purpose. The educational challenge is more than to preserve difficulty indiscriminately or to make learning completely frictionless. It is to distinguish among different forms of friction and decide what should be preserved, reduced, redesigned, or sequenced.

That distinction became harder to hold this year, not easier. As I finished this term, the public conversation about technology in schools narrowed to a single question about removal. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia now require districts to ban or restrict student phones. Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion argues that classroom technology harms learning. Jonathan Haidt’s work has extended its account of a phone-based childhood into the school day. Stefan Bauschard has answered that the ban is the one education reform capable of passing unanimously because it asks nothing of the adults who designed the system. I do not sit cleanly with any of them, and the friction framework is the reason.

This tension clarifies pedagogical friction, the construct I have developed in earlier work (Miner, 2026b). A screen may remove exclusionary friction by providing access, translation, communication, or assistive support. The same screen may remove productive friction when it performs the interpretation, composition, judgment, or social negotiation that a learner needed to practice. The relevant question is more than how many minutes students spend looking at screens. Instead, it is about what a particular device, platform, or task asks them to notice, do, avoid, and become. The framework distributes that question across noetic, rhetorical, existential, and infrastructural dimensions, which is why restriction alone rarely satisfies even its advocates. A device ban operates almost entirely at the infrastructural layer. It changes the conditions the institution sets without changing what the work asks of the learner. This reading is consistent with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ socioecological approach (Munzer et al., 2026), which holds that children’s digital experiences cannot be understood through screen limits alone, and with Odgers’s (2024) caution that causal claims linking broad measures of screen use to adolescent mental health trends remain contested, a caution Haidt disputes directly.

A defensible school response may include screen-free periods and stronger phone boundaries, but those restrictions have to be joined to richer instruction, intentional technology use, student voice, and attention to the institutional conditions shaping learning and well-being. Otherwise, the policy reproduces at the system level the pattern I have described in students. A polished product can conceal a bypassed learning process, and a decisive-looking policy can conceal a bypassed redesign. Removing a device creates space. It does not determine what educators build in it.

Research Craft: Mixed Methods and Managed AI Scaffolding

I have learned much of what I hoped to learn, although not always in the form I expected. I have learned how theory can clarify problems of practice without reducing their complexity. I have learned that research design is complex, especially the mixed methods research I am doing for my dissertation. For me it is a technical procedure that includes using coding and generative AI and agentic AI tools in addition to more traditional tools like Jamovi and SPSS that work in tandem and with my oversight and management to support brainstorming, triangulation, and research.

I enjoy using new and more traditional academic tools to check and validate the research to expand my synthesis for ideas, writing, and implications. It reflects beliefs about knowledge, evidence, interpretation, and whose experiences count. I already knew that visible performance is not the same as durable learning, but as an analog person who transitioned to digital tools and now at the forefront of artificial intelligence, the contrast and pedagogical impact of this transition is enormous. We need great people from across the world and disciplines to help us guide it and apply guardrails so our current K-12 students can have a strong set of knowledge and skills to help the next generation. A polished product can conceal a bypassed learning process, while an incomplete or difficult performance can represent genuine intellectual growth.

Surprises, Disappointments, and the Lifelong Horizon

There have been surprises and disappointments. I have been surprised by how generative, authentic, and organic the work became. A set of research questions grew into articles, interactive websites, presentations, conceptual frameworks, professional learning, and new connections between scholarship and district practice. I have been disappointed by how quickly educational technology can outpace institutional reflection and by how often convenience, efficiency, and visible output receive more attention than learning, privacy, equity, or human development. I have also learned that scholarly progress is rarely linear. Ideas require revision, methods require humility, and meaningful work often advances more slowly than expected.

References

• Bauschard, S. (2026, August 20). The Screenish Inquisition: The newest excuse not to reform education. Education Disrupted: Teaching and Learning in an AI World. https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/the-screenish-inquisition-the-newest
• Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
• Horvath, J. C. (2025). The digital delusion: How classroom technology harms our kids’ learning and how to help them thrive again (Updated ed.). Harmony.
• Miner, M. J. (2026b). When the output looks like learning: Tertiary algorithmicity, unproductive success, and the case for pedagogical friction in K–12 schools. i.e.: inquiry in education, 18(1), Article 4. https://digitalcommons.nl.edu/ie/vol18/iss1/4/
• Munzer, T., Parga-Belinkie, J., Milkovich, L. M., Tomopoulos, S., Ajumobi, T., Cross, C., Gerwin, R., Madigan, S., & Council on Communications and Media. (2026). Digital ecosystems, children, and adolescents: Policy statement. Pediatrics, 157(2), Article e2025075320. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2025-075320
• Odgers, C. L. (2024). The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628, 29–30. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00902-2
• Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Methuen.
• Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf.