Inside the Chapter | An Introduction

Welcome to my professional blog. 
This will be a place for me to unpack theories, journal my doctoral journey, and work through application and research ideas. 

The quick glance: 
• My wife and I have lived in Lafayette for the last decade (her much longer) 
• We have two giant dogs, Berlin & Charlie
• Professionally, I have been a musician, a minister, and an educator (and occasionally all three at once)
​• I currently work as a freelance curriculum writer while working on my PhD. 
• My educational background: 

• 1st year ​PhD student in Curriculum & Instruction (Purdue) (2024)
• M.A. in Theology (Northern Seminary)
• B.S. in Developmental Science/Public Health (Purdue)

After a good handful of years putting it off, I'm finally starting my PhD.
A BRIEF SIDEBAR (THAT I PROMISE WILL CONNECT) — I have always thought of myself as a creative writer, but in reality I have mostly been a creative ideator. I keep a journal in my bag—always jotting down notes for an idea for a novel, a clever turn of words that could fit in a song or a full poem, a sketch of some theoretical model or another—but for the majority of my ideas, they remain just that: an idea, a concept. I find myself perpetually toying with weighty seeds, sensing something profound within, some pregnant purpose to be grown, but never finding the right moment to cultivate them further. 

In the last year, I actually began writing a novel. Creative writing is one of those things that sounds like it should be a light and breezy activity, something merry and good for the soul. And while I have found it to be, yes, good for the soul, I have also found it to be intensely difficult work! I am 80,000 words in, and I have learned much about my own voice, about the nature of characterization and plot, and about the limits of my own attention. But I have also discovered a layer of satisfaction that can only come from entering fully into the depths of an unfurnished idea and clawing your way through to the other side.

It's one thing to imagine a new world, it's another to build the dialogue that forms the characters that live inside of that world. 

In many ways with my PhD, I am finally putting pen to paper (or, who are we kidding, fingers to keys) in order to enter into a chapter that I've always wanted to write. Now that I'm inside of it, I am also realizing—as I did with my unfinished novel—that once you're inside the dream, there are thousands of ways through the other side, and all of them will require tenacity, diligence, and no small amount of sacrifice. 

A Glance At My Scholarship Interests
​My scholarly interests center on the study of ecological methods of pedagogy which understand the mind as inseparable from the body, the relational networks, the cultural artifacts, and the environment of the subject.

I aim to apply these theories to the essential work of education in locations which resist the alienation and oppression of our present neoliberal hegemony: worker's cooperatives, community development sites, organizing/activism/protest movements, religious spaces and faith groups, alternative housing and education, pop culture and folklore, festivals and folkways, and beyond.

I also believe that institutions carry tremendous educative responsibilities, and I am thus committed to  applying systemic critique and organizational principles to help institutions to be human and just.  


I hope that this blog finds itself to be a helpful or catalytic source for some readers somewhere. Please reach out and let me know if anything strikes a chord with you, and maybe we could compose something together that adds a little beauty to the world. 
​Ralph
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