Meixi

Courses taught

• Spring 2022: OLPD 8087 - Culture, Learning, and Human Development
• Fall 2022 & 2023: OLPD 5122 - Indigenous Education (course site)
• Spring 2023: OLPD 8103 - Comparative Education

Profile

From mangrove forests to highland mountains, I grew up navigating languages, and knowledge systems across Hokchiu/MinQiang in Singapore and 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 future wellbeing of Indigenous young people, their families, and the lands and waters where they live? I interweave comparative education, learning sciences and the study of micro-moments of interaction and trans-Indigenous scholarship in my pursuit of this question. My academic and life’s work are deeply informed by my relational commitments to the people and places who have watched me grow up.  

As a Hokchiu/Hokkien land-based scholar, learning scientist, and former middle school mathematics teacher, I work at the intersection of (1) learning sciences and comparative Indigenous education, (2) global, land and family-based teacher education, (3) trans-Indigenous and community-based methodologies, and (4) Indigenous mathematics, storytelling and technologies. For the past 10 years, I have engaged in grassroots educational movements and community-based and participatory designs with young people, families, and schools through classroom teaching, leading an education non-profit in Southeast Asia, and research and policy with community schools throughout México. 

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, walking and storying documented Dakota stories along Wakpa Thanka (https://tinyurl.com/mnistories), and family storytelling with robotics and virtual reality.

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 for Indigenous futures and the futures of other nondominant children. I currently serve as the Resurgence Research Coordinator for the Resurgence Practitioner Network. 

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, 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 learningwithland.com

Selected professional and community affiliations

• International Society of the Learning Sciences
• American Education Research Association
• Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
• Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences Rapid Community Reports Editorial Board
• International Society for Quantitative Ethnography
• Consejo Nacional de Fomento Educativo (CONAFE), México
• Tutoría Thailand
• Redes Global de Tutoría