Associate Professor, Education
Originally from West Harlem in New York City, I have served as a high school teacher, school leader, equity and public purpose director, and school founder in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago. With a PhD in American studies, MEd in administration and supervision, MA in education, and BS in sociology and Black studies, my professional expertise is broad while remaining dedicated to disrupting notions of difference.
My teaching and projects focus on generating empathic communities where young people
and educators have the freedom to think, question, and innovate as they wrestle with
the tangled complexities of self, other, and difference. I am committed to national
and global efforts for social change. My current project is The Study Portfolio, an online transmedia “undercommons” through which the public can experience critical,
creative possibilities that emerge from educators, youth, and the global working class
when provided opportunities to build understanding using new ways of reading notions
of difference.
As the Founding Director of The Ed Factory, I use new genre public aesthetics to disrupt notions of difference and transform
the educational process. I also serve as the Board President of Kite's Nest, a liberatory
education center in Hudson, NY; the Co-Chair of the Oral History Association’s Committee
on Committees; a steering committee member for Inspiring Girls Expeditions, a global
organization empowering young women to lead in science, art, and wilderness exploration;
an executive advisory board member of NYU’s Project for the Advancement of our Common
Humanity, and a member of the CARE Syllabus Advisory Collective at MASS MoCA.
I am the curator and donor of the Young People’s Archive at East Side Freedom Library
and winner of an American Association of University Women’s award and year-long educational
leadership fellowships with New Leaders and Big Picture Learning. I co-edited Starting Up: Critical Lessons from Ten New Schools (Teachers College Press) with Marv Hoffman and contributed the essay “Love Pedagogy:
Teaching to Disrupt” to Niobe Way, Carol Gilligan, Alisha Ali, and Pedro Noguera’s The Crisis of Connection (NYU Press). My articles, multimedia work, and reviews, among other outlets, are
included in MASS MoCA’s CARE Syllabus, Journal for Critical Education Policy, HuffPost, Common Dreams, and Antipode.
My scholarship investigates discourses of racial capitalism and pedagogies of culture
that frame notions of individualism, whiteness, and masculinity. I use audioethnography
(digital oral history remix), an aesthetics-based education methodology I designed,
to examine difference at the intersection of race, social class, place, and school.
Arrastia, Lisa. Love Pedagogy: An Oral History Remix (forthcoming).
Arrastia, Lisa. Beyond School: Education Outside the System (Neurodiversity Press: forthcoming).
Arrastia, Lisa. “Letter to My Student Teachers on a Day of Yet Another School Mass Shooting in America.” Common Dreams. 25 May 2022.
Arrastia, Lisa. “Schools Can No Longer Be Our Social Safety Net.” Common Dreams. 17 August 2020.
Arrastia, Lisa. “Teaching Under Covid: NY School-Reopening Guidance Highlights the Need for a Radical,
Uniform National Response to Covid-19.” Common Dreams. 19 July 2020.
Arrastia, Lisa. “Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Contemporary Education Economy.” Overland 231. Winter 2018.
Arrastia, Lisa “Love Pedagogy: Teaching to Disrupt.” In The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions. Edited by Niobe Way, Alisha Ali, Carol Gilligan, and Pedro Noguera, 231-250. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Arrastia, Lisa. “Love Pedagogy.” Huff Post (18 April 2016).
Arrastia, Lisa. “The Bridge Back: Chris Johnson and the Art of Social Engagement.” Exposure: The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education 47.1 (spring 2014).
Arrastia, Lisa. Review of A Curriculum of Imagination in an Era of Standardization: An Imaginative Dialogue with Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire, by Robert Lake. Teachers College Record (14 March 2014).
Arrastia, Lisa and Marvin Hoffman. Starting Up Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012.
