When instructors design courses, we usually bring to the classroom our own knowledge of a topic, a set of relevant problems to work through, and an understanding of the problem-solving skills that we think our students must learn. Students, in turn, have their own agendas for what they want to get out of a course. If we assume that students will (and should) defer their agendas to ours, they may very well reassert their personal interests-from our perspective-more counterproductively than productively. This dilemma is always salient, especially in courses that contain a significant writing component that aims for growth through critical thought, where students may privilege personal experience above all other rhetorical proofs, thereby disregarding our attempts to get them to develop and practice a repertoire of other techne as well. But the dilemma becomes even more salient for instructors who, in our fast-changing, cultural and technological moment, are integrating LGBT issues into the curriculum. After all, for LGBT people of all ages, the personal is always urgently political. Many LGBT instructors have arrived at a transitional point, as Toni McNaron (1997) puts it, where we are "celebrating sexual orientation as a fact of our intellectual, pedagogical, and professional lives as much as it is of our home lives," but we dare not forget that such "progress could be rescinded by the same liberal bodies that have allowed it to occur" (p. 86). Accordingly, we know that our students (and we) need a
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