Portraits in Leadership: Meet Our Newest Changemaker, Upper School Head 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 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.

Betye, who graduated high school at age 16, studies Mandarin and Spanish at the New School; like our own seniors, Betye is in the process of applying to college. Betye volunteers at the Audre Lorde Project, serves as the Managing Archivist for the Young People’s Archive, and is a member of the Public Theater’s Radical Hospitality Committee.

Another aspect of Lisa’s life is focused on research and writing. Her numerous accolades in the field speak for themselves. She has been awarded fellowships from the Coordinating Council for Women in History, the American Association of University Women, Big Picture Learning, and New Leaders. She co-edited the book Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools, and she has contributed articles to the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Antipode, Exposure, and the Huffington Post. She is also a consulting editor for the journal Schools.

Lisa’s essay, “Love Pedagogy: On Disrupting the Education Economy” was recently published in Australia’s longtime progressive literary journal Overland. On Nov. 28, 2018, at New York University, Lisa joined neuroscientists, activists, artists, and education scholars from across the nation and the globe for an event launching a book in which Lisa has a chapter titled “Love Pedagogy: Teaching to Disrupt.”

The book, The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, edited by Niobe Way, Carol Gilligan, Pedro Noguera, and Alisha Ali, is now available on NYU Press.

Lisa says she’ll never give up working in schools or writing about them. “Writing and the school are areas through which I have the power to provide a voice for young people and their families, myself, and those I call courageous intellectual workers: teachers.”

In Her Own Words: An excerpt from Lisa Arrastia’s address to the Upper School student body on the first day of school

Every school year gives us a chance to be a new and better self. A better self whom we determine. We get to be compassionate this year, if we were not last year. We get to look more insightfully at something we didn’t understand or wouldn’t accept last year, and we can determine to look with new eyes and a more open heart. We get to listen, radically listen, until our hearts crack open and we can see the inherent value of the person and people before us. And finally, we get to welcome the fact that we have been given the opportunity for one more breath, a breath we can take inside the mutual, complex life of a school.

This year, I will look to see you open up to new ideas, be curious and ask open-ended questions, pause and slow down to think, wonder, and reflect. I want you not just to be joyful, but help to produce genuine joy in this school. You and I, you, the faculty, and I are responsible for the welfare of us all. So I ask you to walk gently amongst each other, to listen to and revere all the lives before you while never forgetting your inherent responsibility to build a different world of equity, access, justice, and voice. Connect and reconnect to self and other. Seek to know and listen to understand, this year and all the years.

Finally, a bit more gratitude. Thank you to your families because had they not shared you with us, I’d have no purpose, no first day of school. I will not say that you, that youth are the future, although you are. I will not say that youth are resilient because like adults, young people hurt and the hurt can last, but like us all, we can find ways to embrace change and grow. I am still growing with you.

What I will say is that you are my gift, Brooklyn Friends Upper School students. You are the reason I walk this Earth. I have dedicated my life to the rights of young people and so I honor and I am dedicated to you.