Lisa Arrastía
Founder and former director of a social reconstructionist, 9-12 small school in Chicago, LISA ARRASTÍA has been teaching and leading creative educational programs in independent and public schools for almost fifteen years. Lisa is a certified K-12 principal in Illinois, and holds an M.A. in Education from Antioch University. Her master’s thesis focused on the hidden curriculum of whiteness in independent schools, and her undergraduate work focused on sociology and Black studies. Originally from New York City, Lisa teaches social science courses in the Dept. of Liberal Arts at the College of St. Catherine and the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. Her essay, “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?” was included in Pearl Kane's book The Colors of Excellence (Teacher's College Press, 2003), and most recently, “This is/American and Strange: Mediated Versions of a Native American Child” was published in the Capillano Review, and "Killing the Dark Bodies: Execution as Market Sustainability & State Redemption" was published in Monthly Review Zine. Lisa is presently engaged in two book projects.
With Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at University of Illinois at Chicago, Lisa is co-editing White Before We Got Here: Youth and the Hidden Curriculum of Whiteness. The anthology presents visual images and non-fiction writing by adolescents from various race and class backgrounds. The essays in White provide an exploration of the real socioeconomic experiences and consequences of youth living within the social construction of whiteness. With Marvin Hoffman, Chief Liaison at University of Chicago’s Center for School Improvement, Lisa is co-editing, Starting Up, a book highlighting elementary and secondary schools that have re-imagined ideas of school start-up and program implementation. Marv and Lisa are interested in those educators who have started schools with captivating visions, and who have designed dynamic, complex and different experiences for kids within the known quantity of "school."
Currently a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Lisa’s research examines racialized and classed youth development discourses within what she calls “the contemporary education economy.” This project of education, she claims, is where economic methods of management, regulation, and discipline are used to produce youth as “developed” adult citizens. Lisa’s fields of concentration are racialized youth development, critical pedagogy in education, and social and cultural theories of neoliberalism. Her research considers the ways in which young people, particularly poor and working class youth of color, and elite and working class white youth are juxtaposed against each other and developed inter-and intra-racially to correspond with liberal political philosophies and cultural values. Lisa looks for racial residue in education, built environment, and media discourses that attempt to reinforce the rich|poor - Black|white - good|bad conceptual hierarchies by which youth are differentially judged and developed.
Lisa’s teaching in both English, history, and liberal arts departments in secondary schools and colleges has focused on critical race theory, critical white studies, writing, and critical reading. In the fall of 2007 she received a letter of teaching commendation from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Writing Studies. In her teaching, she uses critical pedagogy to enable students to identify, question, and act on complex social power relationships within local and global contexts. Importantly, Lisa always designs ways for her students to act on what they learn in the larger society outside of the classroom. An example of the innovative methods Lisa uses to commit her students to community action is a course she designed where students explored issues of race, class, and equity in education. The class became the focus of an Emmy-nominated PBS documentary entitled Making the Grade, which is used in teacher education programs, community-based organizations, and departments of sociology throughout the U.S. For Lisa’s efforts in the classroom, she was named Apple Distinguished Educator and won Tech@home's innovation in teaching award for "best integration of technology in the classroom" with her students' CD-ROM, “Race, Redress, and Recovery: A Multimedia Memoir on the Concept of Race.” After receiving an E.E. Ford Fellowship, Lisa produced a video documentary based on her experiences at A.S. Neill's Summerhill School in England, Bob Moses’s Algebra Project in Massachusetts, and various public, charter, and independent schools in Chicago, New York City, and California. The documentary, Color Confuses Us, is a mixture of auto-ethnography, youth voices on race, class and sexuality, and critical juxtapositions of resourced and under-resourced schools.
In all of Lisa’s work with youth and school communities, she tries to demonstrate that the simple act of intimate expression can create powerful shifts in thinking, attitudes, and beliefs. Her main objective as an educator is to motivate and inspire youth and the adults who work with them to take responsibility now for the society in which they hope to live in the future.
To CONTACT LISA: lfwproductions@gmail.com