Franklin Eccher is a second-year doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education and the History Department, where he studies the history of education as a Berkowitz Fellow. His work investigates the relationship between education and social movements, particularly in rural and Indigenous communities in the United States. After working for four years in Sitka, Alaska to build a place-based liberal arts "microcollege," Franklin is particularly interested in the value proposition of higher education for rural and Indigenous students, and how the pursuit of higher education has variously furthered and impeded the self-determination of rural and Indigenous communities.
Franklin is also a Graduate Fellow for the SNF Paideia Program, where he aims to foster intellectual spaces for undergraduate and graduate students which can be embodied, relational, and dialogic. An abiding believer in the transformative potential of liberal education, he is particularly concerned with the purpose and practice of study in and out of the academy.
Advisors: Jonathan Zimmerman and Jared Farmer
B.A., Environmental Studies, Yale University (2019)
History of American education; history of American higher education; environmental history; Native American and Indigenous Studies; philosophy of education; experimental colleges; rural education
University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education - Education, Culture, and Society Program