Using new genre public aesthetics to transform the educational process + disrupt notions of difference.
Super Students #2, Public education is the best economic recovery tool (Vancouver 2009). Bitter-Weber
What We Do
Our work is based in the arts, the humanities, and the science of social connection. Our teacher institutes, workshops, and consulting are design centers for the production and exchange of new educational methods and leadership practices, as well as research-based schools of intellectual and social learning. Our vision is to establish a growing culture of creative educators that includes young people and adults committed to values of equity, access, voice, and recognition.
Why We Do What We Do
The problems that young people experience in their day-to-day lives result from profound social disconnection from self and others. Projects that emerge from Ed Factory programs demonstrate that when people learn to understand race, social class, gender, religion, and sexuality stereotypes as symptoms of disconnection, they're better equipped to design equitable learning spaces that promote engagement and understanding.
Using a love pedagogy™, practiced and written about by Lisa Arrastia since 2014, the Ed Factory projects broaden the reach and significance of teaching and learning nationwide and help local communities become hubs of social change-makers.
Our Unique Approach
In the classroom
We build creative, democratic classrooms in which teachers and students generate meaningful relationships, develop dynamic educational experiences, and connect learning to young people's real lives. We collaborate with teachers and young people to help them design active classroom explorations in which students investigate and use problems in their own lives and the real world as the curriculum's focus.
We provide expert, individual guidance in new and research-based progressive teaching, learning, and experiential leadership practices to individuals and groups in the fields of education and social change, including teachers, administrators, school districts, parent groups, student groups, and community-based organizations.
SITE-Based Teacher Institutes
The Ed Factory Teachers Institute, first sponsored by Minneapolis Public Schools, began in 2011. Today, our institutes are place-based. We design place-based, experiential research. Our participants produce sound archives that hold the knowledge and experience of the community’s people. An Ed Factory archive holds recorded life histories, focused interviews, and what we call Pocket Films.
Each archive is an active repository of reciprocity in which our narrators speak knowing they will be heard, in which the public learns to listen across difference™ to listen to understand to enable policy shifts and cultural practices based on the real needs and wants of the people. that share new ideas, teach the audioethnographic method developed by the founder, Lisa Arrastia, PhD, aesthetics-based educational research methodologies and practices with teachers, and their students and families through a highly dynamic, interdisciplinary learning program.
Teachers are paid fellows in our institutes. Fellows participate in experiential seminars and public symposia with national and global scholars, artists, and educators; gain access to a private online forum and resources; engage in one-on-one mentoring based on our unique approach to teaching and learning; and design the final fellow project.
Institutes work with the whole child—teacher, student, and the student's family. We call this the Ed Factory family. In the Institutes, we show families different ways to see and question their world and then help them create imaginative responses to it.
During the fellowship term, young people can work side-by-side with their teacher and learn to produce audioethnographies (audio essays), sound productions, and other emerging media.
In addition, young people's families can participate in worker-based poetry workshops and global poetry dialogues facilitated by the Worker Writers School sponsored by PEN America.
“Emotional justice [is] an intimate revolution. That is, ‘I want to change.’ How do I go from want to willing? There’s an ocean between those spaces. How do I negotiate with my resistance? It doesn’t just start within, it comes from process. So we create policy . . . then we build platforms on which to issue calls to action that are about people understanding . . . Emotional justice is about the process that you create to make that real for yourself and have that change for other people.”
“It was so wonderful to meet the inspiring educators and leaders who presented at the Ed Factory’s Teachers Institute, to work with longtime educators, and to hear of the exciting work done by my colleagues. This is my 32nd year of teaching. the Institute challenged me to think more deeply about my teaching and in really meaningful ways. ”