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 community self-education as a foundational precursor to political self-determination.
Franklin also teaches in numerous capacities: as a Graduate Fellow for the SNF Paideia Program at Penn, as a Faculty Assistant at the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, and as summer faculty for the Outer Coast Summer Seminar in Sitka. An abiding believer in the transformative potential of a 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
SNF Paideia Fellows Proseminar II (TA Fall 2024)
SNF Paideia Fellows Proseminar III (TA Fall 2025)
Writing (into) Place (Outer Coast Summer Seminar 2025)
“Here Come the Allodidacts,” (co-authored with William Deresiewicz, Ena Alvarado, Brian Hamilton, Benjamin Laufer, Gabriella Okigbo, and Caroline Young), The Hinternet, February 9, 2025. https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/here-come-the-allodidacts
“What Today’s Activists Can Learn from 1968: The Port Huron Statement Still Offers a Pathway to the University as Utopia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 28, 2024. https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-todays-activists-can-learn-from-1968
University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education - Education, Culture, and Society Program
SNF Paideia Program Graduate Fellowship