Transcending Boundaries: LGBTQI+ Students and Empathic Teaching in a Time of Uncertainty

Introduction

The divisiveness of the current political, social, religious, and cultural climate in the U.S. has created a vast chasm that has fractured the belief in inclusion, equity, justice, and civil rights for LGBTQI+ individuals and groups. According to Robyn Dupont from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2023), “nearly 670 anti-LBGTQI+ bills have been filed in state legislatures since 2018, 238 during the first three months of 2022 alone” (Dupont, 2023). These startling numbers remind us that LGBTQI+ individuals face many challenges to full equality in education, employment, housing, and health care. The long history of discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals, and a growing number of recent anti-LGBTQI+ measures, show the effects of an unmitigated heteronormative system on U.S. society, and on teaching and learning in a divisive educational system.

To bring to light the dangers of heteronormative thinking and complicate the limitations of normative stories that are part of exclusionary systemic structures, I pose the following question: How can we create course environments where future and current teachers learn to connect the important role of moral respect, reciprocity, and dialogical interactions and create spaces that move beyond traditional heteronormative boundaries in order to engage with empathy across gender constructs? In my review of current literature, I show that heteronormativity and traditional gender constructs are often amplified by long-established and exclusive national, social, economic, and cultural borders. I then expand on Iris Marion Young’s theory of asymmetrical reciprocity to establish the importance of transcending our own experiences and moving beyond systemic limitations and borders imposed by heteronormative constructs. Such transcendence, I show, can be seen as leaving behind the “terministic screens” (Burke, 1965) that determine how we see the norms of reality, or, in this case, how we move beyond constructs that limit our understanding of different ideological frameworks that include the complex intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, race, age, socio-economic status, ability, and nationality.

I continue by arguing for teaching practices that draw on the concept of what Iris Marion Young (1997) calls “asymmetrical reciprocity.” I show that we need to have “moral humility” (Young, 1997) to accept that even though we can engage in what Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe, 1999), there is much that we “do not understand about the other person’s experience and perspective” (Young. p. 53). Such pedagogical practices, I argue, are necessary to raise awareness about heteronormative privilege and the erasure of LGBTQI+ rights in conjunction with economic, social, cultural, gender, civil, and political rights. I then use a teacher researcher narrative to address my teaching experiences in a graduate program where secondary teachers learn about the dangers of a normative narrative and where they can incorporate alternative epistemological frameworks that take into consideration the many realities of students in their classrooms. I highlight some of the successes of culturally responsive and sustaining teaching (CRST) practices with specific attention to intersectionality that respond to the concerns of LGBTQI+ youth as well as to students marginalized based on cultural, ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds curriculum. I end by outlining strategies that complicate normative stories about LGBTQI+ youth, and that employ an empathic curriculum framework, emphasizing the importance of encouraging rhetorical deep listening in order to emphasize moral respect that transcends limiting interactional frameworks.