Digital Presence Fellowship
Children as Experts
A K-5 fellowship for children's digital presence, developed in conversation with the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
What this is
The MindfulBytes Fellowship is a year-long, school-based program that positions K-5 children as the experts on their own relationships with technology. We don't lecture children about screen time. We don't tell them what to feel. We ask them what they already notice, and we build the rest of the program around their answers.
The fellowship runs in four quarterly co-design sessions inside a single classroom, with the same group of children, the same educator of record, and the same facilitation team across the year. The questions are deliberately simple. The answers are not.
It is a research program and a teaching program at the same time. The research feeds the field. The teaching feeds the children, the educator, and the families who orbit them.
MindfulBytes does not make children immune to technology. It teaches them to notice.
Operating Principle
Children as Experts
The fellowship rests on a single operating principle: when it comes to a child's interior experience of technology, the child is the expert. Not the researcher. Not the curriculum. Not the parent. The child.
This is not a courtesy frame. It is a methodological commitment. We treat the four-question arc as an interview structure where the children are the primary source and the adults — facilitators, educator of record, principal investigator — are the people lucky enough to be in the room. We do not arrive with conclusions. We arrive with questions, and we leave with what the children have shown us.
The byproduct of treating children this way: they show us things we could not have predicted. Across the first cohort, fellows invented new vocabulary to describe their own relationships with technology — terms that did not exist in the screen-time literature before they named them. That was not because the children were unusually gifted. It was because no one had ever asked them directly.
Our Lineage
The Center for Digital Thriving
The MindfulBytes Fellowship would not exist in its current form without the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
CDT's research on adolescent and educator digital flourishing — and in particular Carrie James and Emily Weinstein's body of work — gave the fellowship its posture: the conviction that the people most affected by digital technology are also the most qualified to describe its effects, when given the structure and the safety to do so. CDT showed us, working with adolescents and the educators who teach them, what it looks like to take that conviction seriously inside a school.
The MindfulBytes Fellowship is the K-5 expression of that posture, walked down one developmental stage. The Show and Tell architecture CDT modeled at their Imagine AI event — the slow-build storytelling, the deliberate refusal to compress a child's experience into a soundbite, the way Beck Tench framed observation as research and research as observation — is the architecture this fellowship inherits. We changed the age group, the school setting, and the question set. We did not change the posture.
We are grateful for the CDT cohort that received this work in progress, asked it harder questions than it had been asked before, and helped the fellowship grow up. Specific debts of gratitude are named in the credits at the bottom of this page.
When educators and partner schools ask us what the fellowship is methodologically descended from, the answer is short: CDT.
How the Fellowship Works
One classroom, one cohort, four questions across the school year. The structure is intentionally minimal so that what the children bring can fill it.
The four-question cycle
What do we want this fellowship to be?
The opening session establishes the children as the authors of the program. We ask them what they want the year to look like. Their answers shape the next three sessions.
What do I feel before I reach for the screen?
A somatic-anchoring session. Children learn to notice the bodily signal that precedes the reach — the feeling under the impulse. This is the developmental foundation MindfulBytes is built on: interoceptive awareness as the prerequisite for any meaningful choice about technology.
What would we want to teach our families?
The fellows shift from interior noticing to intergenerational transmission. What they have learned in Q1 and Q2 becomes something they imagine teaching the adults they live with. This is where the fellowship’s reach moves from one classroom into the surrounding families.
What do we want to leave behind for the next cohort?
The legacy session. The children become elders to the cohort that will come after them. They produce a tangible artifact — language, drawings, a recorded message — that the next year’s fellows inherit. Continuity is built into the model.
The roles in the room
Lead Facilitator
Guides the session, holds the methodological frame, makes sure every voice has space.
Educator of Record
The children’s own classroom teacher, who carries the institutional relationship and continues the conversation between sessions.
Shadow / Observer
Present for documentation and methodological apprenticeship, often another educator preparing to facilitate their own cohort.
Principal Investigator
Present as a respectful witness, responsible for the research questions, never the primary voice in the room.
Cadence
One ninety-minute session per quarter, plus integration time before and after each session for the educator. The fellowship year mirrors the school year. A cohort moves from Q1 in fall to Q4 before summer.
What's Emerging
The first cohort is mid-year. We are not in a position to publish findings. We are in a position to share, with care, what is already visible.
We are seeing children name internal experiences of technology that adults have not been able to name on their behalf. We are seeing fourth and fifth graders coin new vocabulary for sensations the screen-time literature has not yet captured. We are seeing intergenerational pattern recognition — fellows identifying, with precision, the same impulses in the adults they live with that they have just learned to notice in themselves.
We are also seeing what we hoped to see: that when children are positioned as experts, they show up as experts. The work is not asking them to perform. It is asking them to attend.
Detailed findings will be released through peer-reviewed venues and through partner-school case studies as the year matures. A first published treatment of the broader MindfulBytes program appears in the proceedings of the 2026 ACM Interaction Design and Children conference (IDC ’26), Reykjavík.
Partner Schools
The fellowship is currently active or activating at three schools.
Rio Grande School
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Independent K-6, founded 1978. Host of the inaugural Cohort 1 (2025–2026).
Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Cohort 1 activates 2026–2027 school year.
VALE School
Parker, Colorado
Cohort 1 activates 2026–2027 school year.
For School Leaders & Educator Champions
If you lead a school or you are an educator inside one, and the description above sounds like it would fit your students — let's talk.
We work with one cohort per partner school per year. The fellowship requires a sustained relationship between the lead facilitator, the educator of record, and the school's administrative leadership. It is not a one-off workshop. It is not a screen-time intervention. It is a year-long commitment to listening to children at a level of seriousness most schools have not previously had the structure for.
Both lead to the same conversation. Tell us which one you are, and we'll start there.
Resources & Further Reading
The MindfulBytes program — of which the fellowship is one expression — has produced seven downloadable guides for teachers and parents. Find them on the Resources page.
A scholarly treatment of MindfulBytes' theoretical frame appears in the proceedings of the 2026 ACM Interaction Design and Children conference (IDC ’26), Reykjavík, June 2026. DOI: 10.1145/3773077.3812138.
Team & Credits
Michael Davis
Principal Investigator. Fellow, Center for Digital Thriving, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Ashley Parker
Lead Facilitator. Director of Client Engagement, Merek Security Solutions.
Bryant Johnson
Shadow / Observer. Partnership lead, Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School.
Jeanett Jansen
Educator of Record, Rio Grande School (Cohort 1).
Rachel Langone
Supportive Observer, Rio Grande School (Cohort 1).
Ahlum Scarola
Head of School, Rio Grande School.
Jenifer Brayman
6th Grade Educator, Rio Grande School.
Tim Terell
Educator, Rio Grande School.
Katie Schor
Educator, Rio Grande School.
NM-CCCR Research Team
Supporting the fellowship’s research arm.
Acknowledgments
The MindfulBytes Fellowship is methodologically descended from the work of the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education. The fellowship's structure, its commitment to children-as-experts, and its refusal to compress a child's experience into a soundbite are inheritances from CDT's research and from the cohort of Fellows and educators who have shared their thinking in conversation with this work.
We are particularly grateful to Carrie James, Emily Weinstein, Beck Tench, and Eduardo Lara Lombarde for the Show and Tell architecture that this work extends to K-5. The 2025–2026 CDT Fellowship cohort received this program in early form and asked it harder questions than it had been asked before. The fellowship is better for having been received by them.
To the fellows of Cohort 1 at Rio Grande School: thank you for being the first to show us how this works. Q4 — your legacy session — will close out your year. What you leave behind is the foundation that every cohort after you will build on.
To the educators, families, and school leaders who hold the room while this work happens: this is your work too. Thank you for making the room.
By Michael Davis, with the NM-CCCR Research Team. MindfulBytes Fellowship is a program of Merek Security Solutions and NM-CCCR.