Meenakshi’s Journey: Machine Learning and the (Re)shaping of Indian Education
With a decade of experience as a software engineer, Meenakshi Mani experienced firsthand the complexity, messiness, and joy of building technologies. Yet beyond the thrill of coding and the developing software, there was an ever-present detachment and abstraction within these processes that troubled her. This growing concern eventually led her to question how tech spaces and the abstractions they foster influence and shape the very domains technologies claim to benefit, particularly education.
“Towards the end of my tenure as an engineer, I went back to school to receive a master’s degree in education. Like countless other tech folk before me, I saw education as a sector where my skills could be applied towards doing good. However, the more I learned about the tapestry of histories, cultures, contexts, infrastructures, politics, and economics that shape public education, the more I realized how ill-suited cultures of tech were to the field.”
This realisation led Meenakshi to critically examine the expanding role of the technology sector in shaping education. Having grown up in India, she was drawn to understanding how AI-powered EdTech is changing Indian K-12 education, and the processes through which engineers and other experts working within the EdTech sector conceptualize of solutions to longstanding educational challenges.
Her research investigates how Indian EdTech engineers and their collaborators—such as data scientists and education specialists—may embed techno-centric views of education into classrooms through AI-driven technologies, and how machine learning infrastructures might influence the aspects of pedagogy and learning they come to view as salient. Beyond the technology itself, she seeks to contextualise these insights within the larger political and economic forces that drive India’s EdTech sector, including entanglements with global tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Reflecting on 2024, Meenakshi is particularly proud of the progress she has made in her research. “I finished interviewing 20 people from the tech industry last year, including machine learning scientists, software engineers, data scientists, and learning scientists. These conversations have been incredibly insightful, significantly furthering my understanding of the Indian EdTech sector.”
She also celebrated a personal milestone when an article she wrote around her research for Insight Magazine—the University of Edinburgh’s economic magazine—won the Insight Prize for the best article in the Autumn 2024 issue.
As she looks ahead to 2025, Meenakshi is eager to dive deeper into her research findings and begin writing her thesis. “I’m looking forward to working with all of my data and sharing what I have learned with others.”
Since joining the Centre for Technomoral Futures last year, she has found it be a vital source of support in her PhD journey. “The research I am doing is interdisciplinary—both intentionally and often unintentionally because of my background in both Computer Science and Education. It has helped a lot to be part of the Centre, where this kind of shifting between research areas and methods is seen as the natural thing to do.”
She values the seminars and workshops organised by the Centre, along with the opportunities to connect with and learn from peers and senior scholars. These experiences have reinforced her confidence in and provided her with new ways of thinking about key aspects of her work. Looking ahead, she hopes to engage more with the Centre’s reading groups and work-in-progress sessions to further enrich her research experience.
We are incredibly proud of Meenakshi’s research and the impact it is making. Her work sheds light on the complex relationships between technology, education, and society, and we can’t wait to see where her journey takes her next.