Teaching About Adoption as an Anti-hegemonic and Anti-racist Effort: A View from American Studies

Teaching a semester-long course on adoption in the Department of American Studies, I treat the study of adoption as a lens for viewing changing social beliefs and practices, employing a multidisciplinary perspective to help students recognize how the kinds of questions asked and kinds of evidence available influence conclusions and attitudes. I describe five aspects of the course—choices about materials, methodology, and student exercises—that help students challenge prevailing explanations of the need for adoption and foster care and revealing the structural racism, sexism, and classism, as well as the outright hypocrisy that obfuscates actual causes and perpetuates an adoption system in which benefits and suffering are distributed in radically unequal ways.