Samuel D. Rocha

Sam Rocha was raised in a lay Catholic missionary family, living in the states of Texas, Utah, Ohio and also Reynosa, Mexico. He attended the Baylor Debate Institute in the summer of 1998, where he discovered and fell in love with philosophy. His religious roots in the charismatic renewal movement took him to Franciscan University of Steubenville where he completed undergraduate studies in philosophy and Spanish literature as a Gates Millennium Scholar in 2005. After graduating, he married his wife, Anne, in her native Minnesota, where he worked for one year at Transfiguration Catholic School as a Spanish teacher and explored corporate positions at Target and Medtronic for another year while completing a Masters of Arts at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota as a Gates Fellow in 2007. From 2007 to 2010 he completed doctoral studies in philosophy of education at the Ohio State University as a Gates Fellow; his dissertation, "Education, Study, and the Person," received the Loadman Dissertation Award. From 2010 to 2012 he was appointed Owen Duston Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Teacher Education at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he also coached the college rugby club to a conference championship and became an honorary member of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies. From 2012 to 2014 he served as Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Presently he is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, where he is a member of the Green College Common Room. Rocha is the immediate past president of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Education, an active member of the Philosophy of Education Society, book review editor for Studies in Philosophy and Education, and the "Lived Theology" section editor at Syndicate Theology. Sam's work orbits his lifelong philosophical, musical, and religious interests. He has played guitar from the age of five and, in contrast to his formal training in letters, he is a folk musician, unable to read or write music. This undertrained sensibility contributes to his fascination with philosophy of education, especially the life and thought of William James -- a psychologist and philosopher trained in medicine and physiology -- and Ivan Illich, the author of Deschooling Society. An early and fruitful engagement with phenomenology, along with a focused study of Jean-Luc Marion, also fuels questions emerging from his experience as a folk artist. His forthcoming book with Pickwick Publications, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person, attempts to begin a philosophical and educational conversation on the sufficiency of art. He has released two musical works, and EP and an LP, and a co-authored chapbook of poetry. His most recent book is A Primer for Philosophy and Education, published by Cascade Books. A lifelong Roman Catholic, Sam's writing considers questions of religious identity from a confessional and autobiographical perspective, along with philosophical interventions into liberation, illumination, political, apophatic, atheistic, and mystagogical theology. His nomadic Texican ethnic heritage and ancestry have led to similar and intertwined reflections on race and Latin American philosophy of education. Along with academic articles and reviews, Sam has written for a number of popular online publications, including two blogs: Vox Nova from 2009 to 2011 and Patheos from 2011 to 2014. He is a regular speaker, panelist, and lecturer at academic meetings, schools, and churches, along with playing shows and concerts.