Courtney Latorre

As I reflect on the explorations of the Public Pedagogy of Upstander Act, I am surprised by how present each week’s focus has been in my life and the lives of my classmates. Reading about the emotions, struggles, hardships my peers experience or witness every day left me with thinking about why these conversations are so important. Having a have a platform in which people can emotionally connect, share stories, offer perspective, is a large part of the human experience and what it means to express ourselves. As I read through different blog posts centered around different but related topics each week, I realized that there were many common themes that united everyone. One theme that I noticed arise frequently was the idea of perspective and who is telling the story. The experience of reading the posts of my classmates felt as though it had multiple layers. First, I was listening to the ideas and thoughts of someone with a different perspective than myself. Then, ...

After exploring H2F2, I started to think about the commonalities of the women included. Although each woman was vastly different in background, circumstance, and role, each woman has confronted conflict with strength and justice. The uniting factor with these women included by Stein and the diverse feminists of present day is the empowerment found within a community. This served as the inspiration for my graphic. Strength and protection can come in many different visuals and presents in numerous ways. When one is faced with the duty of calling on strength, this can appear in different ways and my graphic is representative of this.  I found it compelling that Stein uses diverse items to represent the woman the piece is representing. All of the works appear to have the common sense of strength and heroism. The works are not overly decorative, which conveys the sense of solidarity or strength. Although each woman the works represent embody the qualities of empower...

After listening to, "What About Men?", I started to think about the role feminist men have in the feminist movement. One of the points mentioned that resonated with me was the idea of women having to ask permission to get their power. I started to think about how so often feminism gets painted as a loss or gain of power. It also made me think about the narratives or stories we hear. We are often deprived of hearing multiple sides of history, and rather are presented with the acceptance of what has been made accessible to us.  As a teacher, we often assume we are teaching students how to be an upstander or at least how to show tolerance and acceptance of others. However, I think we often miss the importance of modeling, or living it in our classrooms by presenting multiple perspectives in our day to day routines. I started to think about the idea of bullying and the idea of being a bystander. I started to make connections with the idea of being an advocate vs. being tole...