Redesigning Schools with Family Story Walks in Three Indigenous Contexts
Meixi
About the research
Award
NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award Year
2023
Institution
University of Minnesota
Primary Discipline
Educational Psychology
Indigenous-led public schools are critical sites for experimenting and enacting educational sovereignty. This study engages global Indigenous collaborations of families and educators to design land-based school systems that both shape and are shaped by socioecological shifts of our times. My research study asks: What forms of public schooling support Indigenous families? collective continuance across generations in the face of competing demands and rapidly changing socioecological systems? I explore this question through participatory design research and trans-Indigenous methodologies to design for distinct relational forms of learning where Indigenous family and land-based intellectual systems are the first ontological grounds of teaching and learning at school. Together with four Indigenous communities (e.g. Lahu, Akha, Mayan, Dakota) across three Indigenous-led schools in Chiang Rai, Thailand, Chiapas, Mexico, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, I study how transformed land-educator-family relationships on Family Storywalks expand possibilities for transforming the everyday practices of educators. I use a mix of qualitative inquiry, video interaction analysis, and epistemic network analysis to highlight families? complex theories of collective continuance while extrapolating generalizable patterns across them. As Indigenous communities navigate increased pressures and renewed ways to self-determine their futures, this study contributes sociocultural theories of intergenerational learning and thriving across place. In increasingly uninhabitable worlds, I offer pragmatic strategies to regenerate new forms of schooling within global Indigenous relations toward collective thriving and contribute foundational understandings to human learning that reaffirm Indigenous peoples as permanent generators of knowledge.
About Meixi
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.