Xinyu (Celia) Wei is a second-year Master’s student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development program at the School of Education at UC Berkeley. As an international scholar from China, Xinyu desires to help students celebrate productive struggles, leverage everyday experiences, and develop intellectual and sociocritical thinking skills to tackle worldwide equity barriers within STEM education. Her mission guides her as an emergent researcher who works with classroom teachers and students to design and implement meaningful and culturally grounded mathematics and science curriculum at the K-8 school levels.
Before moving to the United States (San Francisco Bay Area), Xinyu double-majored in English and Education at Southwest University in Chongqing, where she secured three patents as an award-winning science learning product designer. In April 2018, she was funded by the Ministry of Education of China through the National College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program to place her learning kits in various elementary schools for ten months. Xinyu’s first time being a principal investigator helped cultivate a professional commitment and research tenacity that boosted her dream of becoming an educator committed to fostering student agency, ownership, and identity in the STEM classroom.
After studying at Berkeley as an exchange undergraduate for two years, Xinyu became a Master’s student at our BSE in August 2021. In mathematics education, Xinyu is an active member of the Functions research group and a Graduate Student Researcher working with Professor Alan Schoenfeld on his Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework. Meanwhile, Xinyu’s own research examines the affordances of task-based interviews to mathematize students’ in-and-out-of-school cultural experiences during formative assessments.
In data science education, Xinyu is also appointed as a Graduate Student Researcher working with Professor Michelle Wilkerson on Writing Data Stories, an NSF-funded project designed to foster students’ scientific data literacy through investigating, reorganizing, and reasoning the public-opening datasets on the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP). Xinyu is passionate about making science education more accessible for students from socioeconomically minoritized communities by positioning their everyday practices and interests as grounds for expansive learning.
Through her years at BSE, she coauthored a book on the TRU framework, presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference, the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), and a summer school hosted by the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME) in Austria.
Upon graduation, Xinyu is passionate about leveraging her research expertise into practice. She has gained K-8 teaching experience in public, charter, and private schools while working toward her California multi-subject credential. She also taught summer camps at Lawrence Hall of Science and designed a math course for the Berkeley Academic Talent Development Program (ATDP). In her leisure time, Xinyu enjoys teaching children how to speak Mandarin and manipulate numbers on the abacus!
Specializations and Interests
Learning Sciences, Mathematics and Science Education, Classroom Teaching, Learning and Assessment
