Dr Merinda Bermingham is recognised for her expertise in empowering education and critical thinking. She has served in departmental leadership in Middle and Senior Schools at Haileybury, and currently serves as Head of Teaching and Learning in the Senior School. Merinda holds degrees in philosophy, comparative literature, dance, and education from Monash University, including a PhD in Philosophy of Education specialising in the nature of critical thinking and implications for its development in Australian educational settings. She is published by Monash University, in Idiom and Creative Education.
In her current role, Merinda leads academic programs across a diverse range of academic departments over five campuses, and in collaboration with operations in the Northern Territory, China and throughout Asia. Under her stewardship and across her leadership experience, she has cultivated ambitious, inspired, deeply collegial teams and overseen some of the School’s highest historical levels of attainment. She has been instrumental in leading significant change and evolutions across Haileybury’s Senior School operations.
Merinda is driven by an unwavering conviction in the potential of education to empower students to author their lives and worlds. Her mission remains to contribute in the most significant way available toward a democratic, agentic and justice-building education for the empowerment of students and a better world. In her spare time, she writes poetry and insists on pretending she can ride horses.