Dialectical Praxis
Education | Scholarship | Organizing
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About
Hello and welcome! My name is Derron. I'm an educator, scholar, and organizer who cares deeply about humans and our collective liberation.
Hailing from Ohio, my interests and career have carried me across the Atlantic to Western Europe, all the way to the Intermountain West and the Great Basin, to Upstate New York, and to the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas.
My educational background is in languages and linguistics, the scientific study of language, and in college student development. I've worked within higher education institutions for over 15 years teaching, building and supporting communities, strategically creating inclusive spaces and advocating for historically excluded populations, and designing instructional and digital learning.
As a doctoral student of adult and continuing education at Kansas State University, I study adult learning under an imperialist apparatus that governs what counts as knowledge, and I am building a materialist theory of how adults come to accept, reproduce, or break from the frames that order hands them.
When not working, studying, or doing research, you can find me volunteering and organizing, tending my plot at the Manhattan Community Garden, reading epic fantasy fiction, crafting, playing cozy video games, and studying and discussing linguistics and language.
What is Dialectical Praxis?
Dialectical praxis is the transformative process by which individuals and groups come to understand and change the world through reflective, critical, and embodied action. It is rooted in Marxist dialectics, enriched by Freirean conscientização, deepened through adult learning, and oriented toward liberation.
Dialectical (adj.): a way of thinking, reasoning, or engaging with the world that emphasizes contradiction, change, and the dynamic interplay of opposing forces. It is rooted in dialectics, a philosophical method most prominently developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and reworked on materialist ground by Karl Marx.
Praxis (noun): the process of putting theory into action in a deliberate, reflective, and socially meaningful way. Praxis is the fusion of reflection and action into a single movement.
Education
My teaching is grounded in dialectical praxis, the unity of critical reflection and material action. Education is never neutral. The classroom sits inside the same apparatus that conditions what counts as knowledge, and teaching either reproduces that order or works to transform it. I treat learning as the working through of real contradictions in students' material conditions, developing both the consciousness that grasps the relations beneath appearances and the collective capacity to act on them. My practice draws on Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, bell hooks, and Frantz Fanon, and on the longer tradition of movement-based political education in which study is bound to organization. Feminist, decolonial, Marxist, and critical race theories inform this work, held together by a materialist commitment to changing the conditions that produce oppression rather than only the ideas that justify it.
Eudcation ProjectsScholarship
My research sits at the intersection of social epistemology and adult learning. I study how an imperialist apparatus of knowledge production governs what counts as legitimate understanding, and how its operation conditions the learning orientations available to differently positioned social groups. In so-called post-truth societies, this apparatus organizes public understanding of political life through epistemic enclosures: the bubbles, echo chambers, and neoliberal discourses that contain what people are able to know.
Adults do sometimes contest the frames the order hands them. How they do so, and under what material and collective conditions it becomes possible, is the center of my work. I pursue it by building a theory of adult learning from dialectical materialism. Gabriel Rockhill supplies the macro structure, a political economy of knowledge and a basis for distinguishing ideology from science, along with the insistence that orientation is conditioned by mediated material position rather than freely chosen. Paulo Freire contributes the account of how reflection bound to action carries a situated subject through a real contradiction in their conditions. Jack Mezirow gives the finest grain, the mechanics by which a meaning perspective actually shifts. Reflection holds a central place in this synthesis, always anchored in a learner's material position within the apparatus.
My current work extends this framework empirically, mapping the distinct learning orientations that adults occupy across social positions and tracing how those orientations form, hold, and sometimes break.
Organizing
My organizing treats theory and practice as a single movement. Collective action builds the material counter-power through which a dominant order is contested, and study bound to organization is how a movement develops the consciousness to wield it. I center the leadership of those most impacted by systemic oppression, building coalitions across struggles for racial justice, economic equity, housing, and climate.
Through direct action, political education, and grassroots organizing, I work to create spaces where people develop critical consciousness, practice democratic participation, and exercise power together. This is where my research and my practice meet. The reflection anchored in material conditions and joined to action that I study as a theory of adult learning is the same work that political education does inside a movement. My organizing draws on abolitionist frameworks, Indigenous sovereignty movements, and traditions of radical organizing across the Global South.