College of Education and Human Development

Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development

Meixi

  • Pronouns: she, her, they, them

  • Assistant Professor

Meixi

Areas of interest

  • Land-based education
  • Culture, learning, well-being, and human development
  • Global teaching collectives
  • Stories and STEAM Education
  • Indigenous Southeast Asia
  • Community-engaged design research
     
Degrees

Ph.D. Learning Sciences and Human Development, University of Washington- Seattle
M.Ed. Educational Psychology, University of Washington- Seattle 
B.Sc. Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University

Biography

Courses taught

Profile

From urban landscapes and mangrove forests to highland mountains, I grew up navigating languages and knowledge systems across my Hokchiu/Hokkien-Chinese family in Singapore and our solidarities with Lahu communities in northern Thailand. These experiences center my life’s work on an enduring concern: how can schools contribute to the collective livelihoods and wellbeing of Indigenous young people, their families, and the lands and waters where they live? I interweave comparative education, the politics and ethics of learning and human development, and relationalities with lands and waters in pursuit of this question. My academic and life’s work are guided by these relational commitments to the people and places who sustain me, the Jurong and Kok Rivers แม่น้ำกก, and most recently, the lands and waters in Miní Sóta Makhóčhe.

I work at the intersection of (1) learning sciences and global trans-Indigenous solidarities, (2) land, water, and community-based methodologies in teacher education, (3) ethics of climate resiliency and socioecological justice, and (4) Indigenous storying and mathematics. For the past 10 years, I have engaged in community-based grassroots educational movements and land-based education with young people, families, and schools through participatory design research, leading an educational non-profit in Southeast Asia, and research and policy with community schools in México. I come to this work as a Hokchiu/Hokkie non-Indigenous scholar, learning scientist, and former middle school math teacher.

My interrelated program of research, teaching, and service advances the following key areas:

Land and family-based storytelling with educators and community members. This work is intentionally placed at the edges of land, school, families, and communities with a land and family-based teacher education program in Thailand (https://www.aera.net/Education-Research/Education-Research-Service-Projects/AERA-Announces-Recipients-of-ERSP-Awards-Focused-on-Dual-Pandemics-of-COVID-19-and-Systemic-Racism), walking and storying documented Dakota stories along Wakpa Thanka (https://tinyurl.com/mnistories), and family storytelling with robotics and virtual reality. These storywalks or caminatas have also become pedagogical teacher education tools (https://www.facebook.com/CoordinacionTerritorialConafeChiapas/videos/238884631870438) in Chiapas Mexico with CONAFE (https://www.facebook.com/events/1021625232997739).

Community-based design and evaluation of schools. This has involved bringing families, community leaders, educators, and policy makers to envision participatory evaluation as part of shifting power paradigms of traditional evaluation practices. Further, I study the complex strategies, pedagogies, systems of relationships, and learning theories of families as the intellectual and relational grounds to re-design public schools towards healthier socioecological futures and the futures of other nondominant children.

Trans-Indigenous educational collectives and how they work with each other across place. A key area of work has been with the global Redes de Tutoría collective and how teachers build relationships across México and Thailand. Through microethnography and interaction analysis, I pay attention to the global dimensions of learning, Indigeneity, settler and allyship, power and politics, ethics and mobilities across place. I am especially interested in how teachers understand their role across time/space and the ways they re-imagine the purposes and ethics of schooling to design learning collectives that are more restorative and generative for humans and the rest of the living world.

I welcome students interested in:

  • Indigenous education movements
  • Nature-culture relations
  • Land and family-based teacher development
  • Mathematics, technologies and storytelling

  • Trans-Indigenous methodologies

    For more information see learninginrelation.com 

 

Publications

Meixi & Nzinga, K. (2023). Origin Theories of Learning: A River With Many Sources. Review of Research in Education, 47(1), 474–535. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X231225211

Meixi & Johnston-Goodstar, K. (2025). Making Relatives As Pedagogy: Unsettling Universities Towards Human Maturation. Contingencies: A Journal of Global Pedagogy, 3(1, Unsettling Environmental Humanities). https://doi.org/10.33682/h2x1-tvdv 

Meixi. (2022). Towards gentle futures: Co-developing axiological commitments and alliances among humans and the greater living world at school. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1–20. doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2022.2142242

 Meixi, Kongkaew, S., Theechumpa, P., Pinwanna, A., & Ling, A. (2022). Making Relatives: The Poetics and Politics of a Trans-Indigenous Teacher Collective. Comparative Education Review, 66(3), 442–464. doi.org/10.1086/720405

 Elliott-Groves, E. & Meixi. (2022). Why and how communities Learn by Observing and Pitching In: Indigenous axiologies and ethical commitments in LOPI (Cómo y por qué las comunidades Aprenden por medio de Observar y Acomedirse axiologías indígenas y compromisos éticos en el modelo LOPI). Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 45(3), 567–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2022.2062916

Meixi., Moreno-Dulcey, F., Alcalá, L., Keyser, U., & Elliott-Groves, E. (2022). When Learning Is Life Giving: Redesigning Schools With Indigenous Systems of Relationality. AERA Open, 8, 1–16.

Tzou, C., Starks, E., Meixi, Rambayon, A., Marie Ortiz, S., Peterson, S., Gladstone, P., Tail, E., Chang, A., Andrew, E., Nevarez, X., Braun, A., & Bang, M. (2020). Codesigning with Indigenous families and educators: Creating robotics education that contributes to Indigenous resurgence. Connected Science Learning, 2(3). 

Meixi. (2022). Sostener vida, tierra y familia en redes de tutoría Decisio: Saberes Para La Acción En Educación de Adultos, 56, 27–38. https://revistas.crefal.edu.mx/decisio/images/pdf/decisio_56/decisio_56_art04.pdf

Meixi. (2019). Storywork Across the Landscapes of Home and School: Towards Indigenous Futures in Thailand.

Tzou, C., Meixi., Suárez, E., Bell, P., LaBonte, D., Starks, E. & Bang, M. (2019). Storywork in STEM-Art: Making, Materiality and Robotics within Everyday Acts of Indigenous Presence and Resurgence. Cognition & Instruction. 

Leepreecha, P., & Meixi. (2018). Indigenous Educational Movements in Thailand. In E. McKinley & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of Indigenous Education (pp. 1–30). Springer, Singapore. 

Meixi. (2018). The Program for the Improvement of Academic Achievement in México: Tutorial Relationships as an Imposition of Freedom to Transform the Instructional Core. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 0(0), 1–18.