Punya Mishra

Punya Mishra is an American academic, a professor at Arizona State University.

Mishra's work addresses educational technology, creativity, and teacher education. He co-developed the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework with Matthew Koehler. He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and has received awards from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Mishra earned a Bachelor's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in 1988, followed by a Master of Design in visual communication from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1990. He completed a Master of Arts in mass communication at Miami University in 1992 and received a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1998.

Mishra began his academic career in 1990 as an instructor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. After completing his doctorate, he joined Michigan State University in 1998 as an assistant professor, becoming an associate professor in 2005 and a professor in 2010. He remained at Michigan State until 2016, when he joined the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (ASU).

At Michigan State University, he directed the Master of Arts program in educational technology. At ASU, he later served as Associate Dean for Scholarship & Innovation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Since 2024, he has been director of innovative learning features at the Learning Engineering Institute. He has also served on the school board for the Okemos Public School District. Alongside his academic work, Mishra has produced visual art and poetry.

Mishra's research examines teacher knowledge for technology integration, design in education, creativity, and the educational implications of generative AI.

Together with Matthew Koehler, Mishra developed the TPACK framework, which extends Lee Shulman's Pedagogical Content Knowledge to include technological knowledge. The framework was first published in a 2006 article in Teachers College Record. Mishra and colleagues later co-edited the second and third editions of the Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Educators. Researchers including Mishra and Koehler have also developed assessment instruments to measure preservice teachers' TPACK. In 2019, he proposed an update to the TPACK model to incorporate contextual knowledge, and he has examined how generative AI may influence teacher knowledge within the TPACK framework.

Mishra has published analyses on the implications of generative AI for education. His work discusses how teachers may incorporate AI tools, including large language models, into teaching practices through the TPACK lens. He has also studied anthropomorphism in human–AI interactions and the educational significance of this phenomenon, drawing on earlier scholarship on psychological responses to interactive media.

With Melissa Warr, Mishra co-developed the Five Spaces for Design in Education framework, which outlines five domains in which educational design operates: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, and culture. Their research includes analyses of scholarship on teachers as designers and identifies conceptual strands in that body of work. This line of work contributed to the development of a school model implemented in the Kyrene School District in Arizona.

Mishra has collaborated with Matthew Koehler and Danah Henriksen on research about creativity and transdisciplinary thinking. They proposed seven transdisciplinary habits of mind intended to support creative teaching and learning. Since 2012, Henriksen and Mishra have written a bimonthly TechTrends column on creativity, technology, and learning, selections of which later appeared in two edited volumes. Additionally, he has also explored the role of aesthetic experiences in STEM education.

Mishra has created ambigrams, designing word forms that can be read from more than one orientation. In 2015, the Michigan State University Museum presented an exhibition of his ambigram work titled "Deep Play: Creativity in Math and Art through Visual Wordplay." His "good–evil" ambigram appeared in an episode of Brain Games. He has also published writing on mathematics, visual wordplay, and mathematical poetry in At Right Angles, a mathematics education journal.

Beyond his academic work, Mishra is also a visual artist and poet. He co-hosts the monthly podcast AIR GPT, which features discussions on AI and education.

• 2024 - Fellow, American Educational Research Association
• 2024 - David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award, Association for Educational Communications and Technology
• 2025 - Distinguished Alumnus Award, Indian Institute of Technology

• Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.
• Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Shin, T. S. (2009). Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK): the development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42(2), 123-149.
• Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2005). What happens when teachers design educational technology? The development of technological pedagogical content knowledge. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 32(2), 131-152.
• Mishra, P., Warr, M., & Islam, R. (2023). TPACK in the age of ChatGPT and Generative AI. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 39(4), 235-251.
• Mehta, R., Keenan, S., Henriksen, D. & Mishra, P. (2019). Developing a Rhetoric of Aesthetics: The (Often) Forgotten Link Between Art and STEM. in M. S. Khine, & S. Areepattamannil (Eds.). Steam Education: Theory & Practice. Springer.
• Warr, M., & Mishra, P. (2019, March). Teachers and design: A literature review. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1265-1272). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
• Warr, M., Close, K., & Mishra, P. (2023). What Is Not What Has to be: The Five Spaces Framework as a Lens for (Re) design in Education. In Formative Design in Learning: Design Thinking, Growth Mindset and Community (pp. 305-315). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
• Mishra, P., & Henriksen, D. (2018). Creativity, technology & education: Exploring their convergence. Springer International Publishing.
• Mishra, P., & Henriksen, D. (2024). Connecting Mathematics to Verbal–Visual Art. STEAM Education: An Interdisciplinary Look at Art in the Curriculum. Eds. Tracey Hunter-Doniger & Nancy Walkup. National Art Education Association. p. 200-213