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Educating Teachers About Adoption
In the previous post, I suggested that parents be careful not to turn their children into poster children for adoption. Another article from Adoptive Families,written by Lois Gilman, offers excellent tips for being proactive with your child’s teacher regarding lessons that focus on heredity, ethnic origin or genetics – assignments that require children “to come up with information that is missing, incomplete, or quite different from their peers.”
In my experience, such assignments almost always involve an oral presentation for the class, which means that children may be forced to disclose details that they’d rather keep private.
Schedule a conference
Gilman recommends scheduling a parent-teacher conference early in the school year to discuss “potentially problematic assignments.” Keep in mind that the teacher isn’t out to get your child and she probably hasn’t even considered the potential pitfalls of her lesson.
You can help the teacher understand that adoption is one of many family configurations for which a genealogy assignment may cause a child grief. Foster kids, children of divorce and those living with step parents or grandparents may experience similar difficulties. The traditional nuclear family is, practically speaking, a thing of the past. Teachers know this in their heads; it’s all a matter of helping their curriculum catch up with their head knowledge.
In her article, Gilman suggests ways that common assignments can be adapted:
Genetics: Investigate inherited traits among any biologically related group – friends, neighbors, extended family members.
Autobiographies: Axe the time-frames and allow children the option of writing about memorable days, rituals, things their parents have told them about themselves, etc.
My 7th grade son is working on an autobiography in his writing class. The students are doing an A-to-Z autobiography, where each letter of the alphabet represents one facet of their life or personality. This assignment offers a great deal of flexibility and encourages the students to express themselves creatively.
Baby Pictures: Rather than requiring the children to bring in pictures, allow them to draw pictures of themselves as babies, so those who don’t have photos don’t feel awkward or left out.
Another “biggie” in the baby picture category is the “guess who this baby is” bulletin board. My son has a friend from India who was adopted at age 5 or 6 – he and his sister are the only Indian children in the entire school. He didn’t have any baby pictures of himself to display, and if he had, it would have been a no-brainer to figure out which kid was him. Gilman suggests substituting photos with word clues or favorite things.
Country Studies and cultural celebrations: I hear a lot of complaints from adoptive parents about these particular assignments. A child, adopted from China, is assigned to do a report on China because those are her cultural roots. But she’d rather do the report on Norway, because that’s where her (adoptive) dad is from. The teacher refuses. If a teacher gets feisty about this assignment, I’d barge in and have a few words with him or her. Politely, of course.
