Learning to “Do Family” Differently: Towards More ComplexNotions of Family, Culture, and Schooling

Over the past eight years I have been thinking a lot about complexity science and education.Issues of complexity and curriculum have been the focus of much of my previous academic work (Laidlaw, 2001; Laidlaw, 2005).But, it has been within the past two years that I have experienced more life-altering learning experiences in relation to complexity.I became a parent.While more typically, perspectives informed by complexity would suggest the exploration of notions of parenting or families from biological, ecological, or evolutionary perspectives, and while some of the ideas I will address do come from such origins, my route to parenting came via social construction-a relationship formed via miles of paperwork and the approvals of a rather large cast of individuals, agencies, and governments-when I adopted a sixteen-month-old baby girl from China.This article will explore some ways of thinking about families differently, influenced by a weave of both personal experience and adoption research, and informed by complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006), as well as work that can be aligned with complexity research.In many ways, an adoption that crosses boundaries of countries, cultures, ethnicities, race, and those of reproductive norms creates a perturbation from the expected ways of doing things.Specifically, from expected ways of "doing family."Rothman (2005) writes, "Take a kid from a Chinese orphanage and put it in a middle-class "Euro-descent" American home, and a lot of what parenthood is about in America is put into sharp relief" (p. 7).Rothman, an American sociologist who is also mother of a domestically adopted black daughter likens "doing family" in a transracial adoption to "the way that a transsexual does gender."She states, "We're just doing what "normal" people do, but we know we're doing it" (p.4).Rothman describes some of the little tricks she uses, such as standing behind her daughter, with a hand on her shoulder, when they meet the new violin teacher: "Hello, I'm Barbara and this is my daughter Victoria," I say before the teacher can open her mouth.And put her foot in it."(p.4) Rothman's descriptions strike a familiar chord, reminding me of stories from my autoethnographic experiences and those of other adoptive parents I have surveyed.A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) project that I have been undertaking asks Canadian parents to recount their experiences in relation to their family composition, and to share their stories and understandings of their child's experiences of schooling.Within the project, I have also engaged in contextual analyses, examining documents such as curriculum texts, government publications, and classroom instructional materials, as well as looking at perspectives on adoption within popular culture and the media.Throughout the project, I have attempted to examine family diversity in both micro-and macro-directions, from my particular personal experiences to collective experiences of other adoptive families, as well as looking at the ideological realm of discourse and cultural knowledge around family diversity and adoption.As Davis and Sumara (2006) suggest, gaining an understanding of social systems such as families or schools requires "considering all-at-once, the many layers of dynamic nested activity that are constantly at play" (p.28), and the knowledge that such "organizational/organismic layers" may not be neatly separate.The stories shared by parents describe what it is like to "do family" differently, to disrupt normative social categories, and they tell us something about how notions of family, culture, ethnicity, and race are defined in North American societies, as well as how counternormative families are influenced by this conceptual and

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