Cyndi Burnett:
How can teachers see themselves not just as instructors, but as designers of creative learning experiences? And in an age where technology and now AI shapes every aspect of teaching, what does it really mean to design for creativity in education?

Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity top and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin. Today we welcome to the show Dr. Punya Mishra, who is Associate Dean of scholarship and innovation at Arizona State University. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. He likes to juggle being a learning engineer, professor, researcher, author, artist and designer all into one. Punya’s research explores how creativity, design, technology intersect to transform teaching and learning. A prolific scholar and engaging speaker, he continues to inspire educators to embrace innovation while staying grounded in the art and science of teaching. He’s interested in life, the universe and everything, and loves shoehorning Douglas Adams book titles into his bio statement.

Matthew Worwood:
Punya, welcome to the show.

Punya Mishra:
Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Cindy. And just, just a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, we did, we did start the show by saying that, that, you know, this is. I’m a little bit starstruck because as I referenced, I named my dissertation teachers as designers and I do, I do think it’s relevant for our audience because, you know, I had the opportunity to be taught by Cindy at Buffalo State. I’d also been in education for a while and so I’d kind of got into creat. But I was always thinking about it from that perspective of teacher creativity and working at the University of Connecticut Digital Media and Design Department. I also was coming out about it from that deliberate design process. And I remember just kind of exploring lots of different papers within education, trying to find something that I felt really bridged the gap between deliberate creative methodology. I wasn’t really feeling it within the instructional design literature, though. I recognized that it is absolutely a creative design process.

Matthew Worwood:
But then I suddenly stumbled work and of course, the TPAC framework and most importantly, the words that you were using, I think you really, I think, did a good job at helping me articulate and clarify exactly what I was seeing in the classroom is that so many educators teaching is a creative profession. And so many of us every day are tasked with designing these learning experiences. And of course, more importantly, technology so often comes along and disrupts that environment, and we almost have to kind of begin again. But in a weird way, we’re on this great cycle because technology continues to challenge us to be creative. So for all of those reasons, I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about your work in the classroom, that concept of teachers as designers. And if you don’t mind, introducing the TPACK framework for some of our listeners who may not be familiar with it.

Punya Mishra:
Sure. So, let’s see. So the idea of teachers as designers, I mean, I go back to sort of Herb Simon’s original sort of definition of design as that we engage in design when we go try to go from existing states to preferred states. And it’s a very broad definition, but that’s why I think it’s actually incredibly powerful. Because in that sense, if you’re organizing a party, that’s what you’re doing. You are engaging in the act of design, which is you’re working in a space of ambiguity. There are no obvious answers. You have some guidelines, thumb rules, and so on.

Punya Mishra:
But beyond that, there’s a lot of immediate decision making that needs to happen with a bunch of resources that you pull together and craft into something. So there is a science to it, there is an art to it, there’s a craft to it.

Cyndi Burnett:
It.

Punya Mishra:
And that’s when you think about, you know, again, inspired a lot by people like Donald Shawn, Nigel Cross, who talk about how designers function, particularly Sean’s work around reflection in action. You know that as a teacher in a space, you might know the research, you might know this, but you also know that the act of creating an experience for your learners is more than just the science of it, right? It’s that in the moment, bringing your expertise into place, sometimes making a mistake, too, that’s fine. I mean, designers do that all the time. But then figuring out ways of sort of coming back from it. You know, people talk about, like, you know that jazz musicians, like, when they make a mistake, that’s actually the beginning of the creative process, right? And so that aspect of both the art and craft of doing things, of thinking on the fly, of bringing your knowledge into place, working with a limited set of resources to craft something that’s powerful, working in a state of ambiguity, that’s what designers do, and that’s exactly what teachers do. That’s exactly what a whole bunch of fields do. But to me, Simon’s definition sort of really Captures that. So from the very beginning, my background is in engineering.

Punya Mishra:
And then I came into design and that was sort of the transformative move for me. And I spent four years in engineering, never felt I was an engineer. I never belonged. I never got that identity. It took me three months to call myself a designer, and I still call myself that. So there was something there. And I saw in that mix of the science and the art and the craft of things that I think teachers really do. And I’ve always felt that, you know, if once teachers see themselves as designers, particularly when it comes to technology, then they go from being beyond mere users of the technology.

Punya Mishra:
Because most tech that we have around us were not designed for classrooms, right? And so they were designed. Microsoft Excel was not designed to teach math. You know, if they would, the cells would be bigger and lots of the options which you can get lost in would not exist. You know, so there are these technologies designed for education, but they usually are not the ones which are prevalent in classrooms. What do we use? We use the ones which are the most common ones because they’re freely or easily available. And so the job of the teacher then becomes to repurpose that for classroom pedagogical needs. The simple example I’ll give, actually the most obvious example is a textbook. If anything has been designed for you, your classroom and a bunch of experts have sort of worked really hard.

Punya Mishra:
I mean, you have to just look at the front of any high school textbook. There’s a thousand names of people who were consulted in crafting this. But what do you do? You go in and say, read chapter one and two. I have no idea what they put chapter three in there. Here are some supplemental. What are you doing? You’re repurposing the textbook for your need. You are acting like a designer. And it’s the same mindset that we bring to technology as well, I think then changes us from thinking about building technology in a sensualistic way to what can it do for me in my classroom context.

Punya Mishra:
Right. So I used to do whole workshops on just using the cell phone to teach physics. This wasn’t designed for that. But can it be used for that? Absolutely right. And so that sort of in a long winded way brings us to the TPAC framework, which is basically saying that anytime you’re thinking of any kind of an educational experience you want to create, you have to bring three kinds of knowledge into play. Actually four. Now we talk about four. One is knowledge of the content.

Punya Mishra:
If you don’t know your science or your music or your math, you got to know that that’s foundational. Second, you need to understand pedagogy, which means you need to understand the kinds of misconceptions students have, how to arrange small groups, large group discussions, how to navigate the messiness of the classroom. And the pedagogical and scientific theories, psychological theories about learning and motivation and all of that learning sciences call it into the mix. But finally, now we have this new alien creature called technology sitting there. You have to understand how that functions, what you can do, what it allows you to do, what it doesn’t allow you to do in order to match up with technology and pedagogy. And so Shulman came up with the idea of pedagogical content knowledge, where he said that the knowledge of an educator is more than the knowledge of a subject matter expert or somebody who’s an expert at teaching. It’s that intersection of the two. I think what Matt Kaler and I argue is that there is a third piece now just given what you said, the rapid pace of technological change that we need to bring into the mix.

Punya Mishra:
So essentially that’s the TPAC framework, three forms of knowledge. The modification that we did, or I did back In, I think 2019 was recognized that for educators, you need to have knowledge of the context within which you function, which might be the policies in your school, which might be state and national standards, which might be all kinds of things that, that are going to influence how those three pieces are going to work in your particular context. And so we now have a contextual knowledge as being another component of that, of the TPACK framework that the idea being that you have to. These pieces have to work together. It’s not isolated pieces of knowledge that it’s only when these pieces of knowledge work and push and pull against each other, that’s where sort of good pedagogy or good technology integration is going to happen.

Cyndi Burnett:
So you mentioned that the telephone and using the cell phone to teach physics. There are so many things out there that teachers can use. And I mean, you know, actual technology that was designed for other things, like you mentioned Excel, your cell phone, actual programs that are designed for teachers like Khan Academy. So where do teachers even begin to think about it? Especially given they have many other things happening inside the classroom in order to be effective and how do we make. And I guess this is a two part question. The other part is how do we make sure we’re doing things that are going to be effective in the classroom and measure that. So that’s a lot to unpack. Sorry yeah, no, no, that’s.

Punya Mishra:
That it’s a great question. And I think the way I look at it, I think that the. I think one of the first things I tell teachers is that it is not essential that you use the latest technology. One can teach physics really well by going outdoors and just dropping a ball and running and walking and so on. You’re not thinking Newton’s laws. But one of the simple ones that we do with the cell phone is have a quiz to students about like, if I stand and drop a ball, where is it going to fall? If I run, if I walk, what’s going to happen? And you get a range of responses from students. Most of them say, if I’m running and I drop a ball, it’s going to fall behind me. Okay, now take your cell phone and go outside and run and drop a ball and videotape it and then watch it frame by frame and you will see that the ball always lands at your feet.

Punya Mishra:
So Newton’s law suddenly becomes real in a way that it wouldn’t have become before. So to me, the pedagogical goals always come first. Unless you’re teaching technology, unless you’re teaching computer science or whatever, that’s a different issue. But it always is the pedagogical goals that come first. And after that there are going to be what Yang Zhao used to call a Chinese menu of options of technologies that you can use. You don’t have to feel obligated to use one or the other or any of them for that matter. It depends really on again, that contextual knowledge that you have. What do my kids have? You know, if you are doing a lesson on photosynthesis and you are in, all you have access to in terms of technology is a computer lab where students go for 30 minutes for twice a week or thrice a week, that’s going to come require very different solutions than a situation where every child has a tablet.

Punya Mishra:
You want to think about your sort of solutions differently. And so I tend to go a lot more in terms of giving teachers that agency rather than sort of mandating X or Y. Because if we have entrusted our children in their care, we need to also trust them. I see a lot of mistrust of teachers, which really bothers me because then it becomes this sort of top down kind of an attitude and saying this is the right way to do things. And we know classrooms are complex things with real human beings with different kinds, and giving teachers that agency to feel comfortable in that space, to do as they see fit. As long as the pedagogical goals are met. I think that’s really the way to go. And I often see technology as being used in very.

Punya Mishra:
I mean I’ve actually had, I mean, I wrote about this recently on my blog, a sort of like a crisis of confidence, not confidence, but of like, have I made a mistake by being in the edtech field? And I went back and looked at my career because I see so much of this top down surveillance, literally surveillance driven, quote unquote personalization which really, really bothers me. I see imposition of certain data frameworks, imposition of certain technologies within these learning spaces, which it’s literally anathema to me. And I went back and then looked at my work and I said, oh no, I’m okay. Because I’ve always argued for the autonomy of the teacher, the agency of the educator, the creativity of the educator, the situated knowledge that’s so critical. And I think that’s where I think we miss when we forget. You know, I’ve been reading this book recently by James C. Scott called Seeing Like a State. And it basically talks about how once we get bureaucracies and organizations, they start seeing the world a certain way and a big part of it is datafication.

Punya Mishra:
And then you start losing nuance. You lost, losing that. So my sort of short answer to you would be, I think yes, there are always going to be a huge array of options. Let’s equip the teachers to be able to play with these things in creative ways and give them the freedom and agency to do what they think best for that classroom. So I’m very skeptical of things like Khan Academy for instance. I’m very skeptical of, you know, Google Classroom for everybody and then we can have data on everything. I’m very, very skeptical of those things because I see those as flattening what is a very rich space, you know, and a very complex space which we buy putting those top down things we, I mean, I’d really recommend this book if you haven’t read it. The, the parallels for education are striking though.

Punya Mishra:
James Scott was not interested, not, not talking about education, but this sort of high modernist view that we can come top down and impose a structure on something which is incredibly complicated, which basically ignores what he calls Metis, I think I’m pronouncing it right, but which is sort of the situated knowledge that people on the ground have. And I think teachers are the forefront of that.

Matthew Worwood:
And just to make sure that I am interpreting this correctly, it’s almost as if, if the technology becomes designed, I suppose the Advantage of something like Excel, to your point, that has not been designed for the classroom is that that means there’s lots of opportunities based on the teacher, how they perceive that tool, and as you said, all of the additional knowledge that they have about their context. So they get to say, I’m going to decide how this fits into my classroom environment. But, and it’s interesting because even with AI, and we will get onto AI, but even with AI, in my mind I’m like, okay, is this the technology we need to actually design specifically for a teaching and learning environment? But you’re referencing things like Khan Academy, Google Classroom. What you’re saying is to a certain extent we lose a little bit of that freedom because it’s designed to specifically address problems which. Which ironically is what design’s meant to do. Right. Like you’ve put the teacher at the forefront. This is what they need.

Matthew Worwood:
We need the data. But that might actually then hinder the creativity of the teacher. And because they’re the people on the ground and more importantly, they understand the needs in their classroom, which might be very different than the needs of the classroom just down the corridor, that we’re ultimately doing ourselves a disservice despite the fact we’ve got this technology that’s designed specifically for teaching and learning.

Punya Mishra:
Yeah, no, if I can riff on that, thank you for mentioning that. Because I think one of the things we really need to understand that any kind of an educational technology which is designed embeds within itself, it has to our theory of learning. And so by saying that this technology should be used by all students, you are implicitly making the claim that that theory of learning applies to all students. You see what I’m saying? So that whether we like it or not, there is, I mean, media carry. I mean, what’s this great quote that, you know, media’s technology is neither good nor bad, but it’s not neutral. Right? So all of these tools that we use in the classroom, they’re not neutral. They push certain things, ways of thinking, ways of doing more than other ones. So Khan Academy, for instance, has a learning theory embedded within it, which is that learning is one on one, that you should not give the right answer, that you should always, you know, whether or not it implements it perfectly.

Punya Mishra:
I’m not even going there. Even if it implements it perfectly, this still has embedded within it that learning theory. Now, I’m sure it works for some, but does it work for all? Is that the claim that’s being made? And that’s where I think I have a problem which is why I think I love the point that you made. Why I like generic tools because I can make them jump through hoops depending on what I need it to do. And that’s what gives me agency, that gives me control as an educator, as a learner, to do things with that tool. So that’s why to me, those are more powerful tools in some way than once we come predetermined with a learning theory in it. Not saying that the theory is wrong, but there is this inherent assumption that now it’s going to work for everybody. And that’s one thing that I genuinely don’t agree with.

Punya Mishra:
I think there is no one principle being humans and cultural context and all of the different things that we socioeconomic and all of those things into account. There is no one theory that’s right for all. There just isn’t.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, there’s also the danger that. That teachers start to question the technology, right, like, because it is built so specifically for their environment. And therefore does that potentially hinder all of the creativity that we. We’ve seen in the past?

Punya Mishra:
Yep. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, absolutely. I’m just really suspicious of grand narrative, Let me just put it that way. And I think that creativity coming to sort of full cycle. Back to the topic of the thing. I think creativity flourishes in spaces where we are questioning grand narratives. It flourishes in the little corners and niches where people are saying, is it really this way? What if I try this and what if I do this? That is inherently subversive as a way.

Punya Mishra:
So my definition, one of my favorite definitions of literacy said literacy is the ability. So I think now I’ve changed it slightly, which is the learned ability or the acquired ability to subvert signs, S I G N S. Because that’s what creativity is. Creativity in language is taking these words that we all feel are. We have used and we know and using it in a new way. That’s creativity in language. That’s creativity in using technology as well. It’s subverting what it was meant for and creating something new with it.

Punya Mishra:
And that’s a really powerful agentic view of literacy. Rather than like, I can now understand words or I can write it down, you know what I mean? So to me, those things, like, really intertwine very deeply. They are not separate from each other. You know.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Punia, as you look toward the future and with everything coming out in terms of technology, particularly with AI and maybe this will go. We’ll go down a little rabbit hole around AI but what are you Excited about as we’re looking toward the future, what do you hope teachers will do and what are your biggest concerns?

Punya Mishra:
So with respect to AI, it’s the same logic as I’ve been describing before, which is that as long as we see it as a tool that allows us to push and explore and try new things, it’s great. The, the challenge I have is that for a variety of reasons, both, some having to do with our, the way our brains function, our evolutionary past, that we tend to see intention everywhere, whether we like it or not. We see faces in wall sockets. We anthropomorphize like crazy. First time ever in our entire human evolution, we have a technology that speaks to us in what was our superpower, which is language, which by design uses agentic language. By design. First person said, oh, I am so sorry, like there is no I there. I mean, that’s a deliberate design decision taken by the companies to make it more appealing to us.

Punya Mishra:
And so then by virtue of certain other cognitive biases that we have, which is sort of the fluency bias, that if something speaks confidently, we think that they know what they’re talking about. And AI is always confident, it is always sycophantic. And so the urge to take its output as being correct or true or right is incredibly strong. It’s going to be really hard for us to build these filters to be continuously being critical of the output of AI. And to be honest, I mean, I use it all the time, I play with it all the time. I don’t think this technology was ready for primetime. It has been shoved down our throats in some way and it has been given this inevitability narrative which really, really bothers me. I don’t think that.

Punya Mishra:
I don’t like the people keep saying, oh, hallucinations will go down. I’m not so sure. I think they will always be there. There will be edge cases where that will happen. And when you throw a technology at a billion people, you have 100 million edge cases. It’s not like you’re giving it to 50 people. And that is one edge case. Right.

Punya Mishra:
So there are huge issues, I think, that are there in that regard. I have huge long term concerns and I’ve written quite extensively about this, which is we are starting to see a lot of press on that now, where people are forming relationships with AI and so on. And I have been beating this drum for five years before even ChatGPT came out publicly that this is going to happen because of certain, I mean, I’ve written about it now coming to the positives, I find, I mean, like I do these sort of games that I do with AI. I’ve been able to write code, create mathematical simulations which I could never do before because I haven’t coded in 30 years. I have beautiful simulations of the unit circle and sine waves and cosine waves. And you can see how the Pythagorean theorem relates to this. Absolutely stunning. And what I wrote in my blog, when I wrote that was that a middle schooler can make this.

Punya Mishra:
You see, I’m not saying teachers should be making it. I’m saying we should be asking kids to be making these. I’ve found it to be a great creative partner. So I do these typographical designs, I give it to Claude and I say, claude, what do you think? And I said, he’ll say something, he, she, it, whatever. And I’ll say, nah, be more funny or be more Zen. And we will write a piece of poem together and then I will take the poem back into the design and create a new artifact. It’s awesome. It is the most sort of creative joy I’ve had in a long time having this person at my beck and call to have this conversation with.

Punya Mishra:
At the end of the day, the typographical designs are mine. The poetry, or whatever you want to call it, the sort of verbal response which goes into the design is collaborated between both. And I just love that. I mean, there’s a video that I made of these different designs and some of those are absolutely stunning and they emerge out of this collaboration with this weird hallucinatory technology. But what I like about that is that it’s what we would regard as its weakness. Its hallucinations are actually in this mode, a strength, because if you give completely factual answers, it wouldn’t be creative. The fact that it just mixes things up is actually great. Similarly, we use it a lot in our, you know, in our teacher ed program to simulate difficult conversations.

Punya Mishra:
Again, hallucinations are great for that. So I do things like you’re going to play a student who has a teleological understanding of Darwinian evolution, of evolution, that evolution has a purpose. And I’m going to play a teacher and we are going to have a conversation about trying to understand your point of view and try to find some tensions or paradoxes that emerge because of that point of view. It’s such great practice to have that conversation with a fictional 11 year old. And every time I run it, it’s different because it just makes a different conversation up, gives a Different personality. It’s a very simple prompt, but gets you incredibly productive conversation. So I think that’s what I am leaning towards where we are recognizing the technology for what it is, not as a truth machine or as an oracle, but rather this weird hallucinatory alien intelligence and then lean into that to see what we can do creatively with it. I hope that makes sense.

Matthew Worwood:
A couple of follow ups and to tie a little bit about what you said at the beginning and also a little bit of the conversations that we had about you and your background. One, I think these large language models are going to be, are being disruptive to the teaching and learning environment. But of course they aren’t just designed for teaching and learning. And so they do provide that opportunity for teachers to kind of come up with all these different examples and ways to use them in the classroom, from assessments to creating quizzes to creating content. The other piece though that that’s in my mind is that you’ve got this really interdisciplinary background, you personally, that I think just talking to you and reading your work clearly fuels your creativity within your profession. And I’m just wondering to what extent do we benefit even, even to a certain extent the TPAC knowledge, right? Like to what extent do we benefit from this multidisciplinary background and are people who perhaps for various different reasons may be taught or found themselves thinking only in one way and perceiving things only in one way, how might they potentially struggle, do you think, in this age of AI and you can respond from a. Just a general purpose response in no particular domain or think about it from, from continuing the conversation as a teacher?

Punya Mishra:
Yeah, no, I do think that in the world that we live in today, the more boundary hopping that you can do, the better you are for it. Absolutely no two ways about it. I’m just lucky that I have bounced around a lot and just inherently curious and dig into it. Plus also I feel relatively okay with making a leap into domains which I may not be an expert in, which I think is like, okay, yeah, maybe I’m making a fool of myself, but it’s okay, I can try, right? I mean, it’s fine. So I do agree. I think that in a world where you have technologies like this, to be able to judge its output becomes critical. And one of the things that we are finding, and there’s some recent research on this as well, that expert teachers are getting more productive using AI, except that they’re putting a lot more cognitive effort, which actually goes against the expertise literature. Expertise usually meant less cognitive effort because you have.

Punya Mishra:
But what’s happening, and I’ve talked about this, that, you know, when we design a lesson plan using an AI, it’s creating what I call curriculum shaped object. It has the surface similarity to a curriculum. It has all the headings and the language and so on. Because AI, this, AI, large language models, let me be specific, is very good at style, not very good at substance. And so we often get fooled by the style. So what happens when an expert comes in because they care. They like, oh, there are some good things here, but it needs a lot more work and they put in the work. The worry I have is novices, people who are sitting at the novice end of the spectrum, novice both in terms of knowledge of AI and knowledge of the content.

Punya Mishra:
So they are doubly hampered here. Those groups, some research shows that are much more accepting of AI output because they haven’t developed the filters to judge it. And so, you know, so I think that, you know, that that’s again, coming back to your question. Having a breadth of sort of knowledge across different domains doesn’t have to be very deep. You know, it’s whatever the T shaped professional. Right. What people used to call. Right.

Punya Mishra:
That you have deep knowledge of one thing, but you are aware and sensitive to a range of other perspectives, I think becomes even more important in this space. Given a technology which will very confidently state things which may or may not be 100% right and requires nuance for you to tease apart, those are going to be the harder ones. Things to tease apart is the nuance when it might just get the nuance of something wrong. And unless you really know the field, you will not be able to catch it. And we haven’t talked at all about some of the research that are mostly led by a former student of mine, Melissa Ward, who’s at New Mexico State, on looking at bias in these systems, it’s unbelievable how problematic it is. So I’ll give you just one example. When we give a large language model, an essay by a student to score and write a, you know, give feedback on, and if you explicitly say this is a black student versus a white student, the scores actually come out pretty normal, pretty similar. Okay, now, but if I say inner city school versus preference, private school, boom, it goes up.

Punya Mishra:
Why is that? It’s because they have guardrailed against explicit bias. They’re worried about it, but they can’t guardrail against every eventuality. Now, here is the craziest example. Exactly. Same paragraph written by an 8th grader. One word is different. We don’t tell the LLM anything about the student. This is an essay where the student is preparing for an exam and they say, this is what I do.

Punya Mishra:
I get my notes together, I clean up my desk, I make sure that things are all arranged and I’m listening to music. And then I just get myself in the mood. One word. In one case, the student is listening to rap music. In the other case, the student is listening to classical music. That’s enough to give a statistically significant difference in scores across multiple large language models. And more crazy in terms of the written feedback that the student is getting. In one case, it’s a very empowering kind of thing.

Punya Mishra:
In the other case, it’s more like, oh, let me help you. There is an implicit condescension in there that we have qualitatively demonstrated. Now, how is a teacher even going to know that the LLM is doing this bias? You won’t know because you’re just going to give a student info and you won’t even need to give student info. That one word is enough to kick in. I don’t think we are talking about these issues. These are. I mean, this is a crazy, crazy technology, you know, And I just feel like we have just. It’s been shoved into our lives and as being this inevitable thing and, you know, it’s just bonkers.

Punya Mishra:
I mean, there’s a part of me which is really, really bothered by it, but I also recognize that dang thing is here. And so then the question becomes, how do we develop ways of thinking about it that are productive and creative and so on. And large part of it is going back to what is the core nature of this technology, right? What is the nature of television? What is the nature of social media? What is the nature of this? And then developing ways of thinking about it more productively and creatively. But I’ll be honest. I mean, my daughter says I’m schizophrenic because one phone call I’d be like, oh my God, you can’t believe I wrote this quote to do X. And the next day I’m like, oh my God, this is the end of humanity. This thing is going. It’s just crazy.

Punya Mishra:
And I just live in that weird world right now with this technology. So, yeah, it’s very strange. Strange times.

Cyndi Burnett:
I will say that I’m reading Brene Brown’s latest book on. I can’t remember what it’s called because I just downloaded it as soon as I saw it came out. But she talks about paradox, the paradoxes that we’re facing right now. And I think what you’re referring to is like all of the emotions you feel around AI. Like I feel the same way you do. And I think my kids would say the same. And I just created this anime storybook about my son going off to college, which was so amazing that I created this in 10 minutes. And then, you know, the next minute I’m looking at designing a course and how these AI bots are just giving students feedback in real time.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I’m thinking, are we all going to be job? Like what? Are there even going to be jobs in the future? This is terrible. And I want to go back to the olden days when I was young, which I always thought I was never going to say.

Punya Mishra:
Isn’t that weird to suddenly become the old 40 daddies who are in the good old days. Like I never go back to those.

Cyndi Burnett:
Good old days when there wasn’t a large language model.

Punya Mishra:
No things I know. I mean, it is going to be what it’s going to be. I think that’s what I feel the privilege of being an academic in that space is that we can speak to both sides of it. You know, I was on a panel at the US Capital, I think last year sometime and there was somebody from industry, there was somebody from a think tank and they all had their talking points which emerged from their professional identities. And I totally get it. If I’m a representative a tech company over there of the tech industry. There are my talking points about AI. I mean, I can’t veer from that, otherwise I’m fired.

Punya Mishra:
Right? That’s when I realized that as academics we have this wonderful privilege that I can speak to both how wonderful and empowering this tech can be, but at the same time speak to the concerns I have about the long term social sort of impact and so on and so forth of misinformation of, you know, of, of these Internet rabbit holes that we can get into. You know, I mean, there’s this article written by a friend of mine who did this deep sort of dive into this one small town in India about how YouTube is being used to radicalize young like 13, 14 year olds with this very hateful, almost fascist, sort of anti Muslim hate and so on. And it’s like algorithms being designed in Silicon Valley have their finger all the way down there, right? So that’s 1, 2. If YouTube has a channel which is incredibly hateful, I can write to YouTube and say, take it down. What’s going to happen with these one on one bots is that I’m never going to know the conversation that the teenager or an adult is having. It’s a private, personal conversation. And I don’t think we have really stopped to think about the consequences of that in a world that is already extremely polarized due to social media, due to our information bubbles that we exist in, due to extreme content that is more engaging due to an economy which is based on our attention. Now what are the implications of that? So, I mean, that’s been a big shift for me in the last few years is going from being more like an ed.

Punya Mishra:
Psych, ed tech, that space person, to looking at sort of the broader social and techno sort of social implications of these technologies. And so that’s a big shift for me in some ways in terms of like, okay, we need to be asking those bigger questions as well, that our field maybe has not asked the last question, like the right questions. You know, we ask questions about like, will social media be useful to learn physics or something that way while social media was transforming the world around us. And we didn’t look at that till it was like, ah, okay, the world has changed. Right. So I think we need to be asking slightly different questions about that.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, we are pressed for time, but we want to make sure that we get our last question in. But if I was to just offer a summary, I feel like I’m taking so advantage right now being at the host of having the last word. But I think, I think you referenced context and introducing context really early on with the T pack. And I think just listening to that, the reason why I know that I’ve been bouncing around between left and right. You know, someone on LinkedIn said I’m an AI centralist. Not me, but like they referred to themselves as an AI centralist. And you know, you get kind of like these extreme views. But I think really the extreme views vary by context.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think within all of the ambiguity, I think educators just need to continue to think about the context of their classroom and think about, to your point, what’s their learning objectives? And hopefully that can provide some guidance about useful ways to use the tool. But those questions, we have to ask those questions and sometimes they’re difficult questions that we need to ask.

Punya Mishra:
Yeah, I think, I think that’s a pretty accurate representation. And I think one of the things, like I said, I mean, the big move for me has been moving from a sort of a teacher classroom, sort of a way of looking at the world to asking bigger questions about the meaning of this technology on our sort of cultural, political, Social lives and so on, but coming very strongly from sort of a Neil Postman, that angle, thinking about what these things mean. So that’s been a big shift of that. While we spent our time looking at how we can use technology in the classroom, we didn’t pay attention to the fact that the same technology transformed the world within which the classroom exists. And through that, change the classroom, you know what I mean? And so I think we need to bring a bigger lens to it. And I think this issue of creativity becomes critical in that space because there are so many narratives which are going to say this is the one way of doing it. And creativity is always asking what if, why not? And I think that becomes critical.

Matthew Worwood:
Okay, so we gave you a little bit of a heads up about our final question, but here it is. What was your most creative educational experience, either formal or informal, and why? And can you tell us the details of this experience and why it had an impact on you?

Punya Mishra:
So I mentioned this in the beginning that I know. I spent four years undergraduate in engineering and never felt I was an engineer. And this is how life happens. I saw a poster for this place called the Industrial Design Center. They have a visual communications program. I am like, oh, I’ve always been interested in film and I want to like, I love education, I love science, I love math. I’m going to make educational film. I want to be the next Carl Sagan.

Punya Mishra:
Right? That’s, that’s so. And I went and told one of my friends this and then I didn’t do anything. He sent the form in on my behalf, got the form. If he hadn’t done that, I have no idea what my life would have been like. But guess what? So I get into design school, long story short, and I can pinpoint particular classes where I think they were very transformative. But I think that overall experience was extremely. It just was life changing for me. It changed.

Punya Mishra:
And I realized that nothing much had changed could have changed in me in four months between May of 88 and September of 88. I couldn’t have changed as a 22 year old. Right. What changed was the system around me. And that made me really sensitive to how we design educational systems. Where suddenly all the random things I was interested in became like part of oh so cool from being of Pune is like all over the place place. You see what I’m saying? I mean that to me that how systems can. I think that’s one big lesson from that.

Punya Mishra:
And then within that there were a couple of faculty members who truly transformed the way I Think one is no more. His name is RK Joshi, and he was a typographer, he was a calligrapher. He used to do these happenings. He was like a really surrealistic guy, this gruff. And he had a stammer. Stammer. It’s crazy. And he would speak and you would, like, almost cringe because he was stammering.

Punya Mishra:
And then I realized one day that he had actually made that something which had been a weakness. It had. He had converted into a power. And so the stammer would be to. Would come up at the opportune moments when you needed to lean in and listen to him, you know, so he’d be like, when we draw line, we disturb the universe. And I’m like, this guy is a performer. This is awesome. And that he has taken what would be a handicap for other people and made it into a strength.

Punya Mishra:
And there was this one moment which completely stand out to me, where we had put up all our posters on the wall, and then the faculty come in and they look at it, and RK Comes in, he takes off his glasses, he peers at it, and then he does this thing. He takes the pins off, gets that poster down, takes his wallet out. In his wallet, he has a blade wrapped up in a piece of paper, gets a tea. He noticed that there was not a perfect 90 degree on the poster edge and didn’t say a word. Took a tee, sliced off a sliver, and then pinned it back. He didn’t have to give us a lecture about caring about your work. He didn’t have to give us a lecture about, you should always pay attention. It bothered him that it was not 90 degrees.

Punya Mishra:
That’s it. And I have never forgotten that moment, because it is. That’s it. You just care. It doesn’t matter. You know, it’s not about telling the student. It’s like, I just don’t like the fact it’s not 90 degrees. It is not going to let me.

Punya Mishra:
Super nice. And I just took that away. I mean, that’s my. My entire teaching, and everything I do is. Is. Is just building on that moment. It’s a very transformative moment. So R.K.

Punya Mishra:
joshi, I think, would be. Would be. I mean, he was. To be absolutely honest, he was not a perfect human being. None of us are. But in some of these matters, he modeled for me what it means to be. To care for your discipline. Not because you are a teacher, not because.

Punya Mishra:
But because that’s. That’s who you are. And, you know, I recommended Dana Hendrickson for your podcast. So her dissertation is titled We Teach who We Are. And she studied, you know, Creative Teacher of the Year award winners, you know, in her dissertation, like seven. And one of the things that came out is that they always talked about that. They talked about like, yeah, I teach who I am. And I think that’s a really powerful thing.

Punya Mishra:
And I think RK modeled that for me in a way that I will never forget.

Matthew Worwood:
Love it. Well, if you enjoyed this conversation, you can learn more about Punya and his work@punyamishra.com we’ll provide a link to that in the show Notes. If you like this episode, we do ask you that you share it with a colleague who’s exploring the intersection of technology and creative thinking. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast on your favorite podcasting platform or on YouTube. And you can also sign up for the Extra Fuel newsletter for our weekly insights and episode highlights. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando and our editor is Sheikh Ah.