Linz, Austria · São Paulo, Brazil
How decisions about education get made, and what they change.
From national funding policy down to the design of a single classroom task, one question runs through this work: what actually changes, and for whom, when a system decides to teach something differently?
Marjorie Da Cruz is a Design Learning Specialist for project-based learning at the Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U), with a PhD in Mathematics Education and a master's in Public Policy. Her work combines course and programme design with research on interdisciplinary innovation, sustainable futures, and how technologies carry cultural and political assumptions into the classroom.
Four strands
Learning design
Project-based learning, AI literacy, maker labs, and accessibility. Course design, learning pathways, and teaching PBL to master's and doctoral students.
Interdisciplinary innovation
Sustainable futures, AI and large language models in learning, collaboration across fields, and self-regulated learning. What has to change for disciplines to work together in practice.
Education policy
Fifteen years of Brazilian federal education data, analysed geospatially and statistically, alongside work on the epistemology of policy analysis itself.
Equity in STEM
Gender, LGBTIAP+ inclusion, and rural education treated as questions internal to STEAM rather than added afterwards.
Why the range
The path started in mechanical engineering, with eight years in polymer manufacturing: production planning and diagnosing why machines failed. Then mathematics teaching, then public policy, then research. The subject changed; the habit did not. The question is still why a system produces the outcome it produces rather than the one it was designed for.
Education research tends to split between people who study systems and people who study classrooms, and the two rarely read each other. This work sits at both ends. In between came three years running analytics and customer success operations for an education NGO serving more than 500 institutions, which is where the cost of moving an idea from a proposal into weekly practice becomes concrete. That is, in the end, the same problem education reform has.
Currently
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Design Learning Specialist, Project-Based Learning
Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U). Core team member, UNINOVIS Alliance Work Package 2 on microcredentials and learning support in data science.
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Topic Group Organiser, ICME-16
Sustainability and Mathematics Education
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PhD in Mathematics Education
Beyond the Pages: cultural and linguistic aspects of Canadian textbooks