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Love Pedagogy and the Unmaking of the NCLB Generation A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Lisa Arrastia IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Roderick Ferguson, Adviser 11 May 2020 © Copyright 2020 Lisa Arrastia All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements It is only by finishing this dissertation that I now understand why some people write acknowledgements that are as long as a chapter: it is because this thing ain’t no joke. The acknowledgement of how much life history passes and is made and all who have supported one in getting to the place of completion leaves one, leaves me in a deep state of reflection, appreciation, and so I must honor, I must acknowledge what and who helped to gently place me on the pathway to the research and to the writing and, too, what and who was lost on the journey. I raised a child while writing this dissertation. I got old and definitely got gray while writing this. I taught in university classrooms and led schools as a middle and later a high school principal while writing this. I lost my mama while writing this. I tried to fight the paralytic ache of losing her while writing this. Until this very minute, I thought finishing this impossible. I begin by acknowledging David Noble, the chair of my dissertation until his death on 11 March 2018, and up until his death at age 92, just days before his birthday, this father of American Studies would send me chapters from his books on which he expected and respected my commentary. David did not believe in the notion of status. His students were, to him, his fellow scholars and rabble rousers obligated to poke holes in the arguments of the BOO-jwah-zeee as he would always pronounce the social class, always lingering on, emphasizing the boo and the zee with great sardonicism. David, a graduate of Princeton, leaning back at our one of our monthly lunches with Gail, his wife, and Mark, my i husband, his eyes slit, seemingly closed: “the PhD is nothing but a union card into the BOO-jwah-zeee, but if that’s what you want ole friend, I’ll help you get a card.” That’s how David accepted my request for him to serve as the chair. Of my doctoral committee. David, I’m so sorry I couldn’t celebrate this moment with both you. I’m sorry you didn’t get to sign my union card. Roderick Ferguson, my doctoral adviser, always, like David, has believed in my right to my way of thinking, to my practice in education, to this degree. I remember inviting Rod to sit on a panel of black men when I brought Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas’ Question Bridge: Black Males installation to Minneapolis. I’ll never forget Rod’s question amidst the bravado and anger being thrown about the room by the men at the table. Seated in the middle of these men, Rod daringly asked “But what about love?” The room, filled to capacity with black people from North Minneapolis, fell silent. “Might love be a possibility to bridge this divide between who we believe a man to be and who he is?” Rod is a critical theorist, yes, but that does not mean he is not also a genuine love pedagogue. The two agents can live in harmony––and they must if this race of humans is to survive–-inside the same body, heart, and mind. Richa Nagar. Willing to chair my committee without hesitation because she believes in the fact that I research, I do, then I write. Richa asked me, she hoped for me that I would “keep my voice” in the writing. I thank Richa for honoring my voice. I remember when I engaged in a directed study with Richa and then she asked Cathryn Merla Watson and I to co-author a review with her ii for Antipode on Laura Pulido’s Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Cathryn and I acted cool, but we were giddy. Like all those on my doctoral committee, Richa honors student voices. No, she respects all voices and she listens with profound intent. Ronald Greene. We discussed theories of language and education and what schools might be good for kids, for our own kids. Ron and I talked on playgrounds and in his office. Ron’s insights into what language can do is one of the reasons why I listen beneath the words. Thank you, too, to Amy Brown of University of Minnesota’s Graduate Student Services and Progress department. I am not sure that Bill Ayers knows that he is the reason I decided to teach decades ago. In the early 1990s, I read Bill’s To Teach while riding the subway and the Metro North in New York City as I worked in dozens of schools filled with rats, roaches, 45-student classrooms, and always, always black boys in the basement. I will never forget a teacher in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (back when it was black Bed Stuy) handing me a wire hanger with a roll of toilet paper on it: “You can use mine today, but tomorrow you bring your own.” Priscilla Prutzman of Children’s Creative Response to Conflict had hired me to teach conflict resolution, peer mediation, and what we called back then “bias awareness” in public schools across the city. Thank you to Priscilla for giving me the empirical background that probably was the beginning thinking behind this dissertation. iii To Teach, and Bill’s story published long ago, the story about his son, Chesa (whom he and Bernardine cared for while Chesa’s mother was incarcerated), and the bookshelf and the teacher who saw him, really saw him. These stories, his stories and Bill’s support for the last two decades are why I began and still teach. Bill made me know that if I believed in the humanity of and possibility in each child, no matter who they were or what they did, I had the power to make the sun rise or drop for every child in every classroom I joined. It Bill’s work, his writing, his attitude of Yes and I’ll be there and This can be done, just go make it happen (like designing and opening City as Classroom) that made me know I could move a child from sadness to joy. Bill gave me the courage to walk with unabashed vulnerability into every classroom and to beckon the humility of kids to come out and play. Thank you Herb Kohl for telling me that genuinely “good” teachers “believe that every child is their own child,” which confirmed that I had to find ways for teachers to feel that every child was, indeed, their own. Our meeting in that San Francisco coffee shop was certainly the genesis of my understanding of a love pedagogy. Stov (David Stovall). Stov leads with yes (and with uh huh and with for real). Stov and I were born for the struggle, and in the beginning, it is like we were ready to fight for kids to provide them their right to understand the conditions of their lives. Now, older, grayer, we are ready to demonstrate ways to iv share pedagogies of love to promote teaching for understanding. I am glad we grew up together intellectually and in spirit. Thank you, Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin, for carrying me through my Chicago days, for partnering on every project I dreamed up for kids, and never charging because it was for the kids, and for their words, always for the words they shared and continue to share. Claudia Rankine. I love you because I love you, and I love you because since that first day we met in St. Paul at my house, we knew we were connected at a soul level. I knew that the way we saw the world was aligned and that in our own varied manners we would boldly dismantle any hierarchies before us. Thanks for telling me, casually, regarding the act of running and of dissertation writing, “Just go do it. Finish it. You’re already doing it anyway. Now just write about it.” Kite’s Nest: Kaya Weidman and Sara Kendall. I thank them for helping Mark and I to raise our child when the schools couldn’t see her. I acknowledge Sara and Kaya for continuing to allow me to sit beside their brilliance as Kite’s Nest’s board president. I am honored. I am their student. I am in awe of all that the organization brings into kids’ lives and the community of Hudson. So much of who our daughter will be as a woman will be because of Sara and Kaya and because of Kite’s Nest. Marvin Hoffman, when I asked if he would be on the board of City as Classroom, he said Yes before I could finish my request. When I asked if he v wanted to edit a book together about the challenges of starting up a school, he contacted Teachers College Press. We, then, co-edited Starting Up: Critical Lessons from 10 New Schools. After substantial modifications to how I was thinking and, therefore, how I was writing for that volume, and with Marv’s editorial insights, I came to what you see in this dissertation. I acknowledge and have deep gratitude for Marv and for Teachers College Press because they believed in my idea that other school-starters needed to know that educational privatization, that starting up a school, means that in many ways the state leaves you on your own.

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