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,” Eccher 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.
Eccher was drawn to the SNF Paideia Program out of an abiding faith in the transformative potential of liberal education, and a desire to foster intellectual spaces for undergraduate and graduate students which can be embodied, relational, and dialogic. As a Graduate Fellow, he aims to investigate the purpose and practice of study in and out of the academy.