Brad Petitfils
Dr. Brad Petitfils has been at Chapman University since fall 2021. Prior to that, he served in various administrative and teaching roles at Drexel University, the University of North Carolina Asheville, and Loyola University New Orleans, where he also led summer programs in Paris for a decade. His writing has appeared in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Antistasis, and he has presented at academic conferences across the United States and in Canada.
Biography
Brad Petitfils was the founding director of the Student Success Center at Loyola University New Orleans before moving to UNC Asheville, where he co-founded the Academic Success Center. He was then hired as Director of Advising and Student Success at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, before being recruited to serve as Associate Vice Provost at Chapman University in Orange, CA.He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum Theory, a field that asks educators to rethink and reconceptualize the classroom experience, after earning an undergraduate degree in literature and a master's degree in education.
He was initially inspired by the writings of Jean Baudrillard, and his early work was focused on the fields of hyperreality and posthumanism, which led to his first book, Parallels and Responses to Curricular Innovation: The Possibilities of Posthumanistic Education, which was published in 2014 in the Routledge series "International Studies in the Philosophy of Education." More recently, he has researched and taught about various forms of popular culture as critical texts. His writing has appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory, Antistasis, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and he has presented at academic conferences across the US and in Canada.
Education
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Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 2012
M.S., Loyola University New Orleans, 2002
B.A., Loyola University New Orleans, 2001
Books
Articles
Seduction and scissiparity: The American crisis of adolescent identity
Published: Sep 30, 2021 by Educational Philosophy and Theory
Authors: Brad M. Petitfils
Using the existential theories of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this paper examines how the contextual elements of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to an evolutionary process vis-à-vis adolescent mental health struggles which led to a spike in teen suicides during 2020 and 2021. The paper then explores how we might consider deliberate learning opportunities for to help students understand themselves and the impact of what has just happened to the global community.
Encountering mortality: A decade later, the pedagogical necessity of Six Feet...
Published: Dec 09, 2016 by Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Authors: Brad Petitfils
In today's society, where the Promethean project of mastering the universe seems to guide the scientific community to its last moment of triumph—human immortality—young people seem to lack curricular opportunities to engage with mortality. This article explores the use of popular culture as pedagogy through the lens of the HBO series Six Feet Under to facilitate discourse about living with dying around us.
Binary Educators in a Quantum World: Contextualizing the Change Ahead
Published: Apr 18, 2016 by Antistasis
Authors: Petitfils, Brad
In response to the question posed by this issue, "Can technology – and specifically the Internet - save the world?", this essay considers the world as it stood in 2016, merging current events and the state of education, and questions the tensions between the two.
To Paris, with love: we are Parisians too
Published: Nov 20, 2015 by Loyola Maroon
Authors: Petitfils, Brad
Editorial following the Paris attacks in November, 2015