Some months ago Natalie Milman, Jason Trumble, and Andrea Harkins-Brown, the editorial team at the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, invited me to join them in writing a series of four editorials on the grand challenges facing technology and teacher education, one to run in each of the next four issues. They asked me to lead off, which struck me as either a compliment or a setup, and I decided to treat it as both. The first of the four, “The Crisis We Earned: Educational Technology Research and Teacher Education,” is now out in JTATE 34(2).
The series takes up the grand challenges facing the field and will culminate in a call for a JTATE special issue on them. This first one is written deliberately as a provocation, since opening with a careful survey of the literature seemed like a reliable way of guaranteeing that nobody would argue back.
The argument is that educational technology research faces a crisis of legitimacy, and that we earned a meaningful share of it for a range of reasons. It is not surprising that Sweden is spending tens of millions of euros to undo fifteen years of laptops, that thirty-five states banned cellphones in K–12 classrooms in a single year, or that Eric Schmidt was booed at a commencement this spring for telling graduates they would help shape AI.
Of the many mistakes we made the most critical one may have been mistaking the classroom for the whole of a child’s life. As we write in the paper:
… those calling for bans on screens and those conducting research on educational technology share a foundational error: both assume the institution’s perimeter is where education happens. The ban does nothing about the algorithm that resumes its work the moment the student walks out the gate, nothing about the psychological transformation that has, for most students, already happened by the time they arrive in homeroom. Our research, for decades, studied what happened inside the walls while the most consequential education of our students’ lives took place outside them.
Generative AI is about to make that error considerably more expensive, since a technology engineered to converse, flatter, and ingratiate will do most of its work in private, in exactly the places we have never felt we needed to pay attention to.
And our record has been anything but good. As we write:
What is sad is that if any field should have seen what was coming, it was ours: the attention economy, the polarization, the rewiring of a generation’s relationship to truth. While the platforms were doing it, we were, for the most part, running careful studies on whether interactive whiteboards improved test scores on the fractions unit, investigating teachers’ beliefs/perceptions about educational technology, researching short-term uses of technology and its short-term effects, or conducting small-scale studies with little if any long-term impact. That is on us. Not on the companies, whose incentives were exactly what we should have expected. Not on the legislators reaching for the blunt instrument of the ban, but on us.
This does not mean that the field has nothing to show for itself. But it does mean that rigor adequate to a moving, ecological, irreducibly particular object looks different from the rigor we have rewarded. It also means that our long preference for the safety of the research journal over the messiness of public argument has left the field absent from the very spaces where these questions are now being settled.
There is a lot more in the piece, and we would love for you to read the whole thing. As must be clear, we are being somewhat deliberately provocative here. But my co-authors and I would rather be usefully wrong, corrected by colleagues who care about teachers and about this field, than safely silent. So please argue with us.
Mishra, P., Milman, N. B., Trumble, J., & Harkins-Brown, A. R. (2026). The crisis we earned: Educational technology research and teacher education. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 34(2), 141–153. DOI: https://doi.org/10.70725/204083qohprp