Photo by Kevon Hanley

LISA ARRASTIA, PhD | MED

FOUNDIng Director + SENIOR Facilitator

As the founding director of The Ed Factory, in all of Lisa’s work, she 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. Lisa has a PhD in American Studies from University of Minnesota, an MEd in Educational Administration and Supervision from National Louis University, an MA in Education from Antioch University, and a BS in Sociology from SUNY Empire State College.

Originally from New York City, Lisa is Assistant Professor of Education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She, and her husband writer Mark Nowak, live in upstate New York and New York City. Lisa serves as President of the Board of Directors for Kite's Nest in Hudson, NY, a center for liberatory education. Lisa is a member of the Steering Committee for Inspiring Girls Expeditions, a global organization empowering young women to lead and succeed through science, art, and wilderness exploration. She is also an executive advisory board member of New York University’s PACH (Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity), and serves in an advisory capacity to the Dean of Graduate Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada to develop doctoral programs to advance the careers of Black and Afro-Caribbean graduate students.

Lisa is the founder of a social reconstructionist high school in Chicago, City as Classroom School, and the former Principal of Middle School and Head of Upper School at United Nations International School and Brooklyn Friends School respectively. Lisa taught grades 9-12 in the San Francisco Bay Area at Marin Academy while also serving in the senior leadership position of director of diversity, community outreach, and service learning. While at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Lisa taught grades 9-12 history and she was the Founding Director of the Office of Public Purpose and later served as the Assistant Principal to Perspectives Charter School during her fellowship with New Leaders.

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 (State University of New York) Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry. She is honored to have helped to shape and teach in the program for five years as a full-time lecturer while also serving as the University Chair of the Curriculum and Honors Committee of the Undergraduate Academic Council. Lisa’s work as a consultant in independent, public, and international schools nationally and globally continues in the areas of constructivism, emotionally responsive practice, and what she calls “writing-to-process-thinking.”

Lisa’s fields of concentration are an amalgam of methodologies and areas of study: audioethnography, aesthetics-based educational research, and the study of race. Her scholarship investigates the pedagogies of culture, racial capitalism, notions of masculinity, and the intersections of race, social class, place, and school. She is the winner of the Coordinating Council for Women in History Fellowship, the American Association of University Women Fellowship, a Big Picture Learning Principal Fellowship, and a New Leaders Principal Fellowship among other awards and honors. Her articles have appeared in several journals including Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Antipode, Common Dreams, and HuffPost.


RECENT WRITING

• Love Pedagogy: An Oral History Remix (a book in progress).

• Beyond School: Education Outside the System (forthcoming on Neurodiversity Press).

• “Schools Can No Longer Be Our Social Safety Net,” Common Dreams (17 August 2020).

• “Teaching Under Covid: NY School-Reopening Guidance Highlights the Need for a Radical, Uniform National Response to Covid-19,” Common Dreams (19 July 2020).

• “Love Pedagogy: Teaching to Disrupt,” in The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (NYU Press, 2018), eds. Niobe Way, Alisha Ali, Carol Gilligan, and Pedro Noguera.

• “Love Pedagogy: Disrupting the Contemporary Education Economy,” Overland 231 (Winter 2018).

• "Love Pedagogy,” HuffPost (18 April 2016).

• “The Bridge Back: Chris Johnson and the Art of Social Engagement.” The “Focus” for Exposure: The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education 47.1 (spring 2014).

• With Dr. Marvin Hoffman, Eds. Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools (Teachers College Press, 2012).


LISA IS AVAILABLE TO FACILITATE DISCUSSIONS, SEMINARS, WORKSHOPS, AND PROVIDE CONSULTATION TO TEACHERS, LEADERS, STUDENT GROUPS, AND FAMILIES IN SCHOOLS AND ORGANIZATIONS IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS:

  • Audioethnography | A unique, dynamic and innovative qualitative methodology designed by Lisa to establish genuine and long-lasting understanding across difference as a philosophy of practice in schools and organizations.

  • Educational ethnography

  • Aesthetics-based educational research

  • Experiential leadership

  • Professional development design

  • School culture

  • Organizational development

  • Democratic learning communities

  • Creative education

  • Critical literacy and pedagogy

  • Writing and critical inquiry

  • Notions of difference (race, gender, social class, and sexuality)

FADWA ABBAS

FACILITATOR

Originally from Khartoum, Sudan, Fadwa has a BA in English from Columbia University with a minor in education at Barnard College, and an MA. in Post-Colonial studies from University of Sussex in Brighton, United Kingdom. Fadwa has taught language arts and English in public, independent and international middle and high schools in addition to adult ESL (English as a Second Language). Fadwa is fluent in Arabic.

FADWA IS AVAILABLE TO FACILITATE DISCUSSIONS AND WORKSHOPS AS WELL AS PROVIDE GUIDANCE FOR TEACHERS AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS:

  • Writing and critical inquiry

  • Project-based learning

  • Interdisciplinary and thematic learning

  • 3-D assessments

  • Notions of difference (specifically race, language, and immigration)

JAMAL AHAMAD, MED

FACILITATOR | TEACHERS INSTITUTE MENTOR

Jamal Ahamad is a grades 5-12 licensed English teacher in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Jamal has a BA in English Literature and an MEd from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He launched the inaugural Black Studies class at Taconic High School while he was a teacher there, a program he still directs while teaching full-time at the Pittsfield Virtual High School, create in response to the global pandemic. Jamal is, like all Ed Factory facilitators, an aesthetics-based educator. He uses writing, performative dance, and other art forms as a way to make sense of the world around him, and he teaches young people to do the same. Jamal is a visiting instructor in MCLA’s Department of Education minor, Center for Oral History in Education. He teaches courses in Black Studies. He is also a faculty member of Berkshire Dance Theatre and Olga Dunn Dance Company and the founding director of Ahamad Multimedia, where he films, interviews featuring people of interest, produces dance montages, and and reviews socially-relevant YA literature.

With a pedagogy that puts students at the center and intentionally teaches across difference, Jamal is a facilitator with humor, compassion, critical insight, and a love for the life of the child.

JAMAL IS AVAILABLE TO FACILITATE DISCUSSIONS AND WORKSHOPS AS WELL AS PROVIDE GUIDANCE FOR TEACHERS AND YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS:

  • Writing and critical inquiry

  • Project-based learning

  • Interdisciplinary and thematic learning

  • Multimedia teaching and learning

  • YA Literature

  • Notions of difference (specifically race, culture, and masculinity)