Christopher Kirchgasler

Christopher Kirchgasler is a doctoral student in the department of Curriculum & Instruction. As a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, he taught English as a foreign language. Upon returning to the U.S., he taught English for four years at a public charter school in East Boston. His current research focuses on studying the system of reason in the flows of transnational education reforms in Kenya and the U.S. Increasing access to formal education is taken as an unproblematic social good in international development discourse. Studying the rise of fee-based schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa makes visible the possibilities and limits of these contemporary education reforms by placing them in relation to historical theories of difference upon which they’re based. Through an ethnography of parents and children participating in fee-based schooling, he considers the problematic of inclusion and the making of “kinds” of people by analyzing the discourse of those targeted for reform.