Chapters One and Two · Dissertation proposal · National Louis University
When the output looks like learning
A literature review you move through rather than read past. Seven stations trace one argument: that generative AI has changed the symbolic environment in which students think, that the artifact a student submits no longer reliably shows the work it appears to represent, and that schools now need a language for deciding which difficulty to keep.
Pedagogical Friction in the Age of Generative AI and Tertiary Algorithmicity. A qualitative-dominant convergent mixed methods study by Micah J. Miner, Ed.D. in Curriculum, Advocacy, and Policy.
Proposal approved August 2026. This atlas presents the reviewed literature and the conceptual framework. Data collection has not begun, so it reports no findings, collects no data, and stores your progress only in your own browser.
Station map
The Artifact Test
Unproductive success
School assessment rests on an inference: the essay, lab report, or discussion post is a trace of reading, drafting, synthesis, revision, and understanding. Read the submission below and decide what it still proves.
On the causes of the Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from the convergence of ecological vulnerability and economic incentive. Federal land policy encouraged the plowing of shortgrass prairie whose root systems had anchored topsoil for millennia, and wheat prices during the First World War rewarded expansion onto marginal land.
When drought arrived, the exposed soil had nothing holding it. The catastrophe is therefore better understood as a policy failure with an ecological expression than as a natural disaster that happened to strike farmers.
What does this artifact establish?
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Station 01 complete
Continue to station 02The Long Arc
Ong's developmental account, extended twice
Ong described successive transformations of the noetic world — the processes of knowing themselves, not a chronology of tools. Three conditions hold tacitly across his account. Visit all five stages and watch what happens to them.
The three conditions are reconstructed in Chapter Two, not quoted. Ong did not present them as a formal list. They are named because they clarify where generative AI places pressure on his account: if they continue to hold, contemporary digital communication is an intensification of secondary orality; if they no longer hold, an extension is warranted.
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Station 02 complete
Continue to station 03The Rupture
Tertiary algorithmicity and its three pressures
Each condition that broke at station 02 names a pressure. The three are operationally intertwined but analytically distinct. Assign each condition to the pressure that describes its collapse.
Two steps: choose a broken condition, then choose the pressure that names its collapse.
A note on agentic AI. Agentic systems plan and carry out multistep tasks with reduced human prompting. The draft treats this as an intensification within tertiary algorithmicity rather than a fourth stage, because the defining feature — the algorithmic origination of symbolic content — now extends from producing the artifact to performing the work the artifact once represented.
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Station 03 complete
Continue to station 04The Response
The Pedagogical Friction Framework
Four dimensions, but not four peers. Try to build the learner-facing layers first and the atlas will stop you — because that is the framework's central structural claim, and the study treats it as a question to be examined rather than a finding to assume.
Pedagogical friction is the intentional preservation of educationally productive resistance necessary for durable learning under conditions where frictionless automation has become increasingly available.
The term is chosen as a counter to its ordinary meaning. In physics, friction is energy lost, to be minimized. The educational argument runs the other way, treating the relevant friction not as wasted energy but as the effort through which cognitive development occurs.
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Station 04 complete
Continue to station 05The Boundary
Productive and exclusionary friction
An argument for preserving friction becomes an argument for preserving inequity if it does not ask whose learning a given difficulty supports and whose participation it obstructs. Ten scenarios. Some are genuinely contested, and calling them contested is the correct answer.
Where does this difficulty sit?
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Station 05 complete
Continue to station 06The Arena
Objections and the limits of the framework
A responsible framework engages the strongest objections rather than the weakest. Four are stated here at full strength, including one that comes from the theoretical tradition the framework itself draws on. Identify the reply the draft actually makes.
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Station 06 complete
Continue to station 07The Landscape and the Gap
K–12 adoption, policy, guidance, and what the literature has not done
Adoption without guidance is an empirical premise of infrastructural friction. These are weighted descriptive estimates from public RAND/Gallup microdata and published NCES School Pulse Panel results — secondary analysis, not findings from the proposed participant study.
Four literatures, four missing pieces
What the study therefore asks
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Station 07 complete
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