This is part 3 of a series about family tree assignments. Beth Waggenspeck, a communications professor at Virginia Tech, an adoptive parent, and a writer about adoption issues, kindly gave me permission to repost something she wrote about the problem with family tree type assignments.

She continues:

A child from a poor family may have no pictures or milestones ( as of last year's data, 4,350 families in my small, SW Virgina county live without indoor plumbing; 49% of my son's elementary school classmates receive free lunch; 36% are ESL immigrants---do you think these folks can meet the above requirements? A foster child often has NO HISTORY of his/her own to be shared (nor should he/she be asked to share that history); in my son's elementary school last year, there were 9 foster children.

So, a teacher asking for these things is immediately pointing out that these kids are different (again, remember that different is often perceived in the negative, especially by kids) and very likely making them (and their parents) feel bad. Don't tell kids and family to make it up-first, that is a lie; second, it makes the children themselves question why they don't have that information. Explaining that in the home is tough enough---why should your kid have to explain that at school? You cannot explain that to kids whose cognitive levels are not ready yet.

DIFFERENT is NOT something many teachers are capable of handling---and unless they have thought through HOW they're going to handle it in their learning objectives, they're going to be blindsided by the responses they get. To make kids feel different---by offering them the chance to make their own assignment when everyone else is doing the other thing----is not rhetorically sensitive and probably violates the teacher's own learning objectives (if there are any). Parents will not look at an assignment in an educationally-objectified fashion (unless you've taken educational courses, you probably don't have a clue as to what the purpose of such objectives are).

My position is this: if a teacher has clearly considered objectives that s/he can share with me long before the assignment, then those assignments can be met in ways OTHER THAN doing a one-size-fits-all family tree, baby pictures, major milestones, etc. The last thing you want to do is deliberately exclude a student from a class discussion or from taking part in a class project, yet an ill-conceived assignment could do just that. Adoptive and foster families have varying detailed knowledge about their children's biological origins and also have different desires to share or to protect that information, and poorly conceived assignments may violate that.

Here's part 1 of this series.
Here's part 2.
This is part 3.
Here's part 4.