Mila Zhu, Ph.D.
Ludic Scholarship | Curriculum Theorizing
Dr. Mila Zhu is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Coordinator of the EDUC Program at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where she also serves as Founding Director of the Center for Interconnected Curriculum and Networked Learning (ICoN Learning). An interdisciplinary curriculum scholar, she examines how bodies, technologies, narratives, and more-than-human worlds shape learning, care, and ethical judgment. Her scholarship works at the intersections of health science and public health education, posthuman ethics, embodied and public pedagogy, and human–more-than-human coexistence. Drawing on ludic, narrative, and postqualitative approaches, she studies and designs learning across teacher education, professional preparation, and XR- and AI-mediated environments.
Dr. Zhu is the series editor of Ludic Scholarship: Games, Learning, and Innovative Pedagogy at Peter Lang and the author of The StrataPlay Methodology: A Lorekeeper’s Game Design in Postqualitative Inquiry (Peter Lang, 2025), which develops a multilayered, game-inflected, and narrative-driven approach to research and design-based inquiry. She is also co-editor of the companion volumes Recipes of Motherhood and Edible Tales (Myers Education Press, 2026), which explore food narratives as sites of memory, identity, care, family, community, and learning. Her forthcoming book, Ethics, Pedagogy, and Inquiry in Contemporary Health Science Education: When the Body Interrupts the Syllabus (under contract with Myers Education Press; forthcoming 2027), extends this work into health science education by examining what happens when bodily vulnerability, ethical uncertainty, and emerging technologies interrupt formal curricula.
Before joining Southeastern, Dr. Zhu lived, studied, and taught in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, experiences that continue to inform her international and comparative perspective on curriculum and education. A grand winner of the First Asian Youth Piano Competition and an active freelance musician, she also brings musical and artistic practice into her work across pedagogy, curriculum theory, multicultural education, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Dr. Zhu was named to Oklahoma Magazine’s 2025 “40 Under 40” for her leadership in shaping the future of education. She received Southeastern’s Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Outstanding Research and Scholarly Activity in 2024 and 2026 and the Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2023.
Dr. Zhu is the series editor of Ludic Scholarship: Games, Learning, and Innovative Pedagogy at Peter Lang and the author of The StrataPlay Methodology: A Lorekeeper’s Game Design in Postqualitative Inquiry (Peter Lang, 2025), which develops a multilayered, game-inflected, and narrative-driven approach to research and design-based inquiry. She is also co-editor of the companion volumes Recipes of Motherhood and Edible Tales (Myers Education Press, 2026), which explore food narratives as sites of memory, identity, care, family, community, and learning. Her forthcoming book, Ethics, Pedagogy, and Inquiry in Contemporary Health Science Education: When the Body Interrupts the Syllabus (under contract with Myers Education Press; forthcoming 2027), extends this work into health science education by examining what happens when bodily vulnerability, ethical uncertainty, and emerging technologies interrupt formal curricula.
Before joining Southeastern, Dr. Zhu lived, studied, and taught in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, experiences that continue to inform her international and comparative perspective on curriculum and education. A grand winner of the First Asian Youth Piano Competition and an active freelance musician, she also brings musical and artistic practice into her work across pedagogy, curriculum theory, multicultural education, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Dr. Zhu was named to Oklahoma Magazine’s 2025 “40 Under 40” for her leadership in shaping the future of education. She received Southeastern’s Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Outstanding Research and Scholarly Activity in 2024 and 2026 and the Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2023.