Lisa Arrastia
Dr. Arrastia’s lifetime of work focuses 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.
Her commitment to writing as a way to think through, to process, to muddle, and to interrupt notions of difference allowed her to become one of the first of several writing scholars and rhetoricians to teach in University of Albany’s Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry. There, she was a full-time lecturer while also serving as the University Chair of their Curriculum and Honors Committee. She continues her work as a consultant in independent, public, and international schools, and she can’t imagine not working to support and design constructivist, emotionally responsive education using writing to process thinking.
Dr. Arrastia has taught grades 9-12 in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Chicago, the latter where she served as a Director of Diversity, Community Outreach; and was the Founding Director of an Office of Public Purpose. She has also held posts as a middle school and high school principal in NYC, and she founded and led a high school in Chicago.
She is the President of the Board of Directors for Kite's Nest in Hudson, NY, a center for liberatory education; and she is an executive advisory board member of NYU’s PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity). She is also a consulting editor for the peer-reviewed journal Schools, and the Founding Director of The Ed Factory, a project using the art of social engagement to transform the educational process and challenge social categories of difference. She is a designer and lead facilitator for The Ed Factory’s Teachers Institute, a professional development program building a network of critical educators committed to creative, democratic classrooms. Finally, she co-facilitates, with youth, the Ed Factory’s Young People's Archive (YPA), a digital archive using audioethnography and emerging media to train young people and adults, to recognize and record how individuals and communities experience the crisis of connection. YPA also works to critically examine the social and economic conditions that (re)produce racial, gendered, and social class injustice and trauma…with the hope of generating healing.
You can reach Lisa at lisa.arrastia@mcla.edu
Lisa Arrastia
Dr. Arrastia’s lifetime of work focuses 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.
Her commitment to writing as a way to think through, to process, to muddle, and to interrupt notions of difference allowed her to become one of the first of several writing scholars and rhetoricians to teach in University of Albany’s Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry. There, she was a full-time lecturer while also serving as the University Chair of their Curriculum and Honors Committee. She continues her work as a consultant in independent, public, and international schools, and she can’t imagine not working to support and design constructivist, emotionally responsive education using writing to process thinking.
Dr. Arrastia has taught grades 9-12 in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Chicago, the latter where she served as a Director of Diversity, Community Outreach; and was the Founding Director of an Office of Public Purpose. She has also held posts as a middle school and high school principal in NYC, and she founded and led a high school in Chicago.
She is the President of the Board of Directors for Kite's Nest in Hudson, NY, a center for liberatory education; and she is an executive advisory board member of NYU’s PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity). She is also a consulting editor for the peer-reviewed journal Schools, and the Founding Director of The Ed Factory, a project using the art of social engagement to transform the educational process and challenge social categories of difference. She is a designer and lead facilitator for The Ed Factory’s Teachers Institute, a professional development program building a network of critical educators committed to creative, democratic classrooms. Finally, she co-facilitates, with youth, the Ed Factory’s Young People's Archive (YPA), a digital archive using audioethnography and emerging media to train young people and adults, to recognize and record how individuals and communities experience the crisis of connection. YPA also works to critically examine the social and economic conditions that (re)produce racial, gendered, and social class injustice and trauma…with the hope of generating healing.
You can reach Lisa at larrastia@me.com
