ASU recently hosted, what is known as, the world's largest scientific gathering, the annual conference of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. As as part of this conference I was invited, along with Ariel Anbar and Trina Davis, to talk about our...
Thank you, Sonya
Written for my dear friend Sonya-Gunnings Moton, on her retirement from the College of Education at Michigan State University. Dear Sonya, wishing you all the very best on your retirement. Just want to say how much I have valued having you as a friend and colleague...
Designing the futures of STEM education
“What knowledge is of most worth?” is a question asked over a 100 years ago by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His unequivocal answer was—science. This question (and his answer) resonates even today, though the context within which it is asked, and how we...
Silver Lining for Learning, a side conversation
We have had a few regulars on the Silver Lining for Learning show. And one of them is Priyank Sharma who consistently joins us despite it being around 2 or 3 AM in in New Delhi when the show runs here in the US. Priyank and I spoke on the 22nd of June about a range of...
A Silver Lining side conversation with S. Giridhar:
S. Giridhar (Giri), Chief Operating Officer of Azim Premji University (APU) and I had a chance to chat for a Silver Lining for Learning side conversation. Giri is a good friend and we connect at multiple levels. We both went to the same undergraduate institution (BITS...
Of metaphors & molecules: Bridging STEM & the arts
Update on blog post that was published May 30, 2018 - since the article is now published (2 years since it was accepted for publication). Square Root: Illustration by Punya Mishra What do President Kennedy's speeches have to do with cell biology? And what does the...
Us in Flux: A conversation with Sarah Pinsker
The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU has a new series called Us in Flux. Every two weeks they publish a (super-short) short story that explores "themes of community, collaboration, and collective imagination in response to transformative events." They...
COVID19 & Education
The COVID19 crisis has disrupted education globally at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, we are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! Over the past year I have been involved in a range of initiatives, discussions, interviews, and...
Words & Worlds with Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson, an award- winning author, editor, and Associate Professor in the University of Kansas’s MFA in Creative Writing program. In her teaching Kij brings some serious credibility as an artist, scholar, and all-around “uber-geek.” Kij has published three novels,...
My journey through design: Keynote at IDC
Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...
Learning science with the body
We often think and understand the world using our bodies. Our senses and movement shape how we form and process knowledge. Paul Reimer, Rohit Mehta and I explore this idea and its educational implications in a new article published in iWonder: Rediscovering School...
3 super-short stories
Students in my EDT180 class spent some time yesterday writing short stories. Super short stories, trying to tell a complete story in just 55 words! As it turns this (55 Fiction) is actually a thing – as a simple google search will reveal. Seeing my students engage in...
David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire
A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...
Technology & Education: A provocation
Jill Castek, at the University of Arizona, invited me to participate in an NSF funded workshop on developing "Principles for the equitable design of STEM learning environments." The event was being held at Bioshpere 2, which is this awesome place near Tucson. Because,...
Keynote at MITE 2019, Sydney (video)
I was recently invited to present a Keynote at the Mobile Technology in Teacher Education (MITE) 2019 Conference hosted by The University of Technology, Sydney. This was the fifth edition of the conference, and as it turns out, I had given a keynote at the first...
Educators as Designers
How might we? Three words, and a question mark. At one level it is a simple question—leaving open what it is that we might do. But at another level its openness is its strength. Because inherent within it is a call to action, a discomfort with the way things are, and...
Creativity and the urban STEM teacher
I have written previously about the MSUrbanSTEM project and what it has meant to me. Over the past couple of years we have also published about this line of work (most prominently in a special issue of The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching)....
Peer review in the science classroom
Fig. 1: Header image. Credits: Illustration by Punya Mishra. License CC-BY-NC. The scientific method is a myth. In more ways than one. Typically in school you are taught that the scientific method consists of making observations, developing hypotheses, testing them by...
The future of work & learning: An interview
I had posted earlier about my visit to Bangalore back in summer to participate in the Quest 2 Learn Annual Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. The two day conference focused on The future of work and learning. During my visit I was interviewed by Aakash Sethi, the...
Better late than never, 21st century learning
Quest Alliance is an NGO based in Bangalore that seeks to equip young people with 21st century skills by enabling self-learning. I have known of Quest and its director, Aakash Sethi, for over a decade now. In fact I had blogged about Quest back in 2008 here, and...
Multiple metaphors & science learning: New article, new illustrations
180-degree rotational ambigram for "metaphor." I have been (co)writing a series of articles for iWonder: Rediscovering School Science, a journal for middle school science teachers, published by the Azim Premji University. (Previous articles in...
The beauty of randomness
I have always been intrigued by the idea of how truly random our lives really are. Seemingly minor events can trigger effects, rippling through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations. Ray Bradbury's short...
2017 Torrance Lecture on Creativity
This past April, I delivered the annual E. Paul Torrance Lecture at the University of Georgia. Being invited to give this talk was a huge honor, for two main reasons. First, because of Paul Torrance, the person for whom this lecture is named. Dr. Torrance, known...
Creativity & Flow: New article
180-degree rotational ambigram for "Flow" by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features Susan Perry, social psychologist,...
The reductive seduction of other people’s problems
The reductive seduction of other people's problems, Illustration by Punya Mishra Anurag Behar forwarded an article: The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems, which I really think is a must-read for any of us involved in education or development. The...
Blurred visions: Another history of TPACK
I had posted recently a video based on a talk I had given at ASU. In that video I spoke about the role of theory in research through a history of the TPACK framework. You can see the video here. Now, my TPACK partner in crime, Matt Koehler, has created his own...
Untangling a decade of creativity scholarship
How do we capture a program of scholarship in an image? This is particularly complicated when the work is a tangled web of connections between research, teaching and practice, spread out over multiple publications, presentations and people. One attempt to do...
49 Amazing moments of STEM: New article
The universe is made up of stories not atoms — Muriel Rukyeser (Image © punyamishra) Every educator has had an amazing teaching moment. It is that magical moment, when the topic comes to life and the energy in the classroom is palpable. These are moments that we...
An homage to my mother & grandfather
Ravenshaw University, Cuttack India I gave a talk today at Ravenshaw University (formerly Ravenshaw College) in Cuttack, Odisha on the topic of Rethinking Learning in the 21st Century: Creativity, Technology & Systems Change. I have given many talks...
Uncreativity: An interview with Chris Bilton
"un-creativity" design, invariant under rotation by 180-degrees In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Chris Bilton, Reader at the Centre for Policy Studies at University of...