“There is also a tendency to link identities with beliefs.”

YES. I really enjoyed your post. I wanted to quote the above part because I agree that students have a tendency to do this, and I always struggle with how to handle that. (I think teachers struggle with this too, sometimes, for that matter.) You do a great job of explaining how you handled that, and you’ve given me some strategies to think about, so I thank you.

As far as students go, it seems that part of their identities=beliefs assertions seem to involve age and experience… but even when I taught community college, I had adult students state that I “must be a liberal” because I have all these tattoos. Eh. (Really, I think I must be a liberal because even though I am a cisgender hetero-lady, I am lucky to have been pretty good at empathy from a young age. I also had a mother who was willing to let me reject of a lot of the binaries that society wants to push on us, but anyway…)

I try to do my best to let my students be in charge of what they acknowledge about themselves, and how/if/when they do it. Mostly I hope it’s gone okay; I hope they think so too. As it has turned out, I’ve had a girl ask to pray in my classroom where she felt safe, and a student officially out himself to me because I had treated him “just like everyone else” all semester. I’ve had students who were homeless that opened up about those experiences, impacting me and the rest of the class with a lot of new knowledge. While some situations have gone more smoothly than others, I just hope I’m always that kind of teacher that all students feel like they can approach. You seem like you probably encourage your students to be that way too.

(Also, I love the thought experiment animals you mentioned in class.)