When I was in high school, our science teacher, who loved any kind of experiment that might make his students squeamish, told us to find out what our parents’ blood types were, and bring that information to school the next day. We had no idea why, but the next time our class met, he handed us each an alcohol wipe and a sharp needle. “Poke the end of your finger and squeeze a blood droplet out,” he instructed us. “Today we are going to learn how to do blood-typing.” And after a lot of false starts, everyone in the room finally managed to get a droplet of blood onto a slide.
After we completed the lab instructions, our teacher collated all of our results by asking each of us our parent’s blood types and then ours, filling in a giant chart on the whiteboard behind him, and it all went well until a girl in our class gave him her blood type, AB, and her parent’s blood types, A and O. Tenth grade biology class is not the ideal place to discover that you are not biologically related to your parents.
Academic assignments that make assumptions about genetics and family of origin permeate every grade level of school. From the dreaded ‘family tree’ assignment to projects that expect children to have baby pictures and know the circumstances surrounding their birth, these lessons, which are based on one specific family configuration that assumes all students grow up in their family of origin with a mother and a father, not only exclude adopted children but also those in foster care, those growing up in both official and unofficial kinship adoption, as well as other children who, for a vast array of traumatic reasons, may not have access to the information required of them to complete the coursework as assigned.
Origin story assignments pop up at every grade level, and in almost every class, and for many adoptive parents, navigating them can be difficult, because there is often pushback from schools and teachers, who can be quick to point out that many families really enjoy watching their children embrace their heritage and culture and share it in the classroom. Often when adoptive parents do speak up they are met with defensiveness, and that makes sense: teachers get a lot of criticism from parents. But it is a parent’s job to advocate for their children, especially when school assignments can inadvertently cause trauma, force a child to relive grief and loss, or out their adoptive or foster status to their classmates.
I thought I was prepared for all the ‘family tree’ nonsense, but then my kid brought home a ‘star of the week’ form, something their teacher did to give kids a chance to feel special and share a bit about themselves. Which is very sweet, but it asked for baby photos, which I don’t have for my daughter, who was adopted at five, and it wanted all sorts of information about the time she was born, her parents’ names – with spaces for a mom and dad only – and cultural/ethnic heritage info. It was impossible to convince the teacher that this thing meant to make my daughter feel special and celebrated made her feel horrible and othered. – Sara, adoptive mom
When these assignments are sent home, the first step in advocating for your child is to walk through the assignment and identify what makes it problematic – not just for your kid, but for others as well. Is it asking for baby pictures, or information about their birth? Does it make assumptions that family members share the same racial, religious, and ethnic heritage? Will doing the assignment force any child to disclose that they are adopted to their entire class, removing the agency they deserve over their own story and information?
We got the ‘draw your family tree’ assignment in second grade, and my kid decided to fill it out by drawing her own extra branches on the tree for her birthparents, birthgrandparents, and her two half-sisters. Her teacher sent it home with a note asking her to redo it ‘correctly’. We declined, and let her take the zero grade. I loved it, sent her birthmom a scan of it, and framed it to hang in her room. That's a zero grade we can support! Leah, adoptive mom
The key to advocating for change is to first understand the point of the assignment. Write your autobiography assignments are meant to get kids writing by giving them a topic that teachers assume should be the easiest to write about – themselves. The point of these assignments often isn’t the topic itself as much as it is getting students to build confidence in their writing skills. In instances like these, suggest alternatives that still offer kids an opportunity to write about themselves without forcing them to relive trauma or admit they don’t have the information being asked for. Offer up prompt substitutions such as write about your favorite sports figure, or write about your favorite memory. Give examples that provide children with the agency to decide what they want to disclose and what they prefer to keep private about themselves.
When I pushed back on a social studies assignment that would have forced my kid to disclose a lot of very personal information about his origin story and adoption in the guise of teaching about world geography and culture, his teacher’s response was to tell him that if he didn’t feel comfortable telling his story he could just make something up. What kind of lesson is that for a kid? – Adam, adoptive father
When advocating for adopted and foster children, it’s important to remind educators that if every child in that classroom cannot do the assignment as written unless they employ deception or disclose painful memories, the problem isn’t the student, it’s the assignment. Alternatives to assignments like this might be to take the personal connection out, and let kids pick and research a culture or country of their choosing, giving them an opportunity to follow their curiosity about other countries and cultures while retaining agency over their personal information.
At parent-teacher conferences last year, I made a comment about how uncomfortable it is for my foster son to be given writing prompts about his ethnicity and heritage – we have very little information about either, and that lack of knowledge really stings him. His teacher’s defense was to say that so few students are affected that she didn’t see the point in changing the prompts. – Maren, foster mom
The most recent government data on foster children suggests that there are more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States, and 5 million Americans alive today are adoptees. This might be the time to ask your child's teacher questions like, “How many students would need to be affected before we start modifying assignments to be more inclusive for every student?”
Adoption is trauma, and lessons filled with assumptions about families don’t just exclude large numbers of students, they can also trigger unresolved grief and traumatic responses in children. Many teachers are simply not aware of how difficult these assignments can be for their students, or the negative impact they can cause, in part because the cultural discourse surrounding adoption paints it as a uniformly positive event that betters a child’s life. This is why it is so important to advocate for children whose families are non-conforming in any way, and to encourage teachers to find ways to modify coursework to create a healthier classroom environment for all of their students without sacrificing the educational goals intended. As well, it can be helpful for adoptive parents to be proactive at the beginning of the school year by providing appropriate adoption education resources for teachers. Adoption Basics for Educators, published by the Iowa Foster and Adoptive Parents Association, is a great resource guide to give to teachers, and Teach All Families publishes a comprehensive list of adoption resources for educators.
My biology classmate – the one who found out she was adopted because of our lab assignment – missed the next few days of school, and when she finally did return, she wasn’t the funny, boisterous girl we knew. In class, she kept her head down, and never voluntarily spoke. As an adoptive parent, I think about her every time I have ever had to navigate lesson plans with my own children to find ways to make the curriculum they are taught more adoption-friendly. There is always a way to modify required lessons to be more inclusive. In my own biology class, the teacher could have informed parents, first, about the planned lesson, so that families that aren’t biologically related could work with him to find an alternative path to learning. He could have given students an opportunity to opt out, or work in teams, so that only one student had to donate a drop of blood. With a little creativity, there are a number of ways in which the lesson could have been taught without causing harm to any student, and that’s the goal of working with educators to create more inclusionary assignments.
When my own son’s teacher sent him home with a family tree assignment, I reached out, to ask, “What is the underlying goal of this assignment?” The answer surprised me. I didn’t think she really cared that much about what everyone’s grandmother’s names were, or how far our kids’ could trace their lineage, and I was curious. Turns out, ‘scissor dexterity.’ Students in his grade had to master using scissors, and she figured cutting out leaves and gluing them to a tree would help them build that skill. When I explained why it was so difficult for my kids, and likely other kids in her class, it was a perspective she’d never considered before, and she agreed to find an alternative. On Parent-Teacher night, I walked into her classroom to find one bulletin board had been turned into a giant tree, with sprawling branches, covered in dozens of shakily cut-out leaves, each one bearing a word that answered prompts about their favorite things in a wide array of categories: ice cream, sports team, person, TV show, movie, song, article of clothing, color, smell, season, etc. My son’s teacher walked over to me while I admired it, and pointing at one leaf, she told me, “This one made me cry. I’m keeping it.” In the center of the leaf, my son had written her name. She was his favorite person.
One of the basic tenets of our Activism in Adoption Speaker Series is the need to develop the knowledge necessary to be an advocate and ally for adoption constellation members. For adoptive and foster parents, part of this advocacy is developing a toolkit of resources for your children’s teachers, to make sure their classrooms are as inclusive as possible for all of their students. Join us at Activism in Adoption to learn more about how to become a better advocate for birthparents and adopted people.
