Meet Our Newest Changemaker: Upper School Head
© KEVON HANLEY
LISA ARRASTIA by Jeffrey Stanley Lisa Arrastia, the new Head of Upper School, comes to BFS with a stunning, well-earned résumé. Here are just a few of the highlights: middle school principal at UNIS, the United Nations International School; lecturer in SUNY Albany’s Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry; founder and former director of a high school in Chicago; Director of Diversity, Community Outreach and Service Learning, and English teacher at Marin Academy in the San Francisco Bay Area; Director of Public Purpose and history teacher at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago; author, researcher, organizer, mentor, board of trustees member — and through it all —changemaker. Lisa’s work in the nonprofit educational sector is equally impressive. This native New Yorker is President of the Board of Kite’s Nest, an educational social change organization for youth in Hudson, New York, and she continues to work with the Ed Factory, a consultancy she founded whose mission it is to use “the art of social engagement to transform the educational process and challenge notions of difference.” In 2009, Lisa created the Young People’s Archive. She is also a candidate for a Ph.D. in American studies at University of Minnesota, where she has also taught, and her fields of concentration are critical education, youth, and race studies. In every aspect of her life, Lisa has demonstrated a determined and singular focus on students and schools. “Since my days in first grade at Lenox, now the Birch Wathen-Lenox School, to the 12th grade there, and now to my days here with you, I have spent every day between
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September and June inside a school,” she told the Upper School student body in September. “Every new school year gives us dozens of first days. I think this might be one of the central reasons why I have never left school.” While working with teachers and young people across the country, Lisa has developed a qualitative research methodology known as audioethnography. “This approach allows young people and teachers to use what I call engaged interviewing, radical listening, writing to inquire, and audio production and editing to help understand how people experience the world and notions of difference.” Lisa shares, “Often, real listening is radical because like the word’s etymology suggests, when we listen we get underneath, to the bottom, we get at the root of what someone thinks, believes, and feels. To listen with radical intent is to slow down and to listen beneath the words others say. When we listen with this kind of purposefulness, we give a gift to our narrators because their experience is allowed to be heard.” This process is also something Lisa defines as listening to understand and listening across difference. “It’s about exploring silence, exploring pauses, trying to listen and put into your back pocket your own biases as they emerge while listening.” Outside of BFS, Lisa spends time with daughter Betye and her husband Mark Nowak, an English professor and recipient of the Guggenheim for poetry. Mark is the founder and director of the Worker Writers School, an organization that facilitates poetry workshops for global worker centers.
IN LEADERSHIP>
12 BROOKLYN FRIENDS SCHOOL JOURNAL Winter 2018/19
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