discussion 3
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Week8-InternationalAdoptionsfromRussia_ToughLovePodcastAdopteeCollaboration_W22.pptx
International Adoptions from Russia & the Tough Love Podcast, adoptee collaboration: Welcoming Glenna boggs, ASEM 2696 Alum, DU alum
Week 8: ASEM 2696: Comm & Adoption
Pre-Curriculum Materials
The Dark Matter of Love: Science can Change the Way you Love & Viewing Guide
Interview with the creators of Tough Love Podcast: Adoptees’ Perspectives on Relationships: https://du.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01UODE_INST/1gq64ta/alma991042178135502766
Episode 6 “In or Out of the Adoption Fog, with Natalie Boggs:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6XtSBIpYtcUQbIBLxsmhtB
Welcoming adoptee guests: Spotlight – Glenna Boggs
In Week 8, we are fortunate to be welcoming our first adoptee guest speaker: Glenna Boggs. Glenna was adopted into the US from Russia in 1999 at 9 months of age with her biological twin sister, Natalie. Glenna graduated with a Bachelor of Music with a focus on Bassoon Performance. Glenna is completing her Master’s of Music Education at the University of Pacific. After taking ASEM 2696, Glenna co-created the Tough Love Podcast: Adoptees’ Perspectives on Relationships with Lauren Fishbein (international, transracial adoptee from Chile in reunion with birth family and adoption therapist) and Deontae Boswell (transracial adoptee, born and raised in Austin, TX, in an open, domestic adoption).
Please share with our guest why you enrolled in ASEM 2696: Communication & Adoption
Circle of Voices
5 minute free write—post on canvas
What connections did I make while listening to Glenna’s talk today that I want to remember?
The Dark Matter of Love: Science can Change the Way you Love
Pull out Documentary Viewing Guide
The Dark Matter of Love: Communicating attachment & love in Relationships
“Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert Marvin has spent a lifetime developing a scientific intervention to help children learn to love. His framework draws on experiments into the attachment patterns of monkeys, birds, and animals. This is a story of a family going through his program.”
Lluba: “Masha came to us when she was very young. I felt we were immediately tied together. She sometimes stayed with me and we were very happy. Why didn’t I adopt her myself? My house is too small, and the authorities wouldn’t give her to me. She used to say, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay with you. But she always wants to be part of a family. She always wanted a mother and father. So, I hope it will work out fine.”
Dr. Marvin: “There’s a real possibility for Masha that her early relationship with Lluba may provide her some underlying patterns of being within a relationship that could really help her as she goes through this process of becoming a member of this new family.”
For More, See The Dark Matter of Love viewing guide
The Dark Matter of Love: Science can Change the Way you Love
Documentary asks the questions . . .
What is love?
Can Love be Learned?
Discussion Post 3: Aesthetic, Art to Learn
Centers Course Learning Goal #2:
Integrate course curriculum to think in new and more informed ways about your own identity, relationships with others, adoption, and/or family structures in the broader culture [application and integration learning goals]
Aesthetic Discussion Post: Art to Learn
Prompt: Create a visual that paints a picture of how curriculum from Week 7, 8, or 9 deepens your thinking about your own identity, relationships with others, or broader cultural conversations about the family or adoption.
Include a handcrafted visual (Can be created a sidewalk chalk drawing, sketch, painting, textile)
Photographed by the student
Posted to the course discussion board
Look at online images of Chalk Art for inspiration, use your own creativity, imagination, and artistic sense
Create a 250-word narrative
Create a 250-word narrative that unpacks how the visual depicts deepened thinking about your own identity, relationships with others, or broader cultural conversations about the family or adoption.
**refer to specific design elements in your visual (e.g., colors, graphics, lines, sizes of elements in relationships to other, etc.) and tell us specifically what they symbolize. What do they represent? What are you trying to convey?
**Get FEEDBACK before you post – show to roommate, friend, significant other and see if you need to clarify your explanation
Logistics of discussion Post 3
Due Thursday, March 03 by 11:59 pm: Visual and Narrative
Peer Response, due Friday, March 04 by 11:59 pm
Grading Criteria
Effort (Visual demonstrates student investment of time, labor, & thought)
Photograph Quality (intentional, clear)
Description (Clearly and specifically demonstrates how specific design elements of the visual represents how Week 7, 8, or 9 curriculum deepens student thinking about identity, relationships, and/or broader cultural conversations about the family or adoption)
Peer Response expectations
Centers Course Learning Goal #5: Feel a sense of connection, community, and belonging with the professor and students in this course, continuing to learn from and with each other as DU students and alumni long after this course is over. [human dimension learning goal]
Respond with the heart. Emotions are okay in this class; no need to bifurcate the mind and body
Respond intentionally
Center our course Ground Rules when you respond (on Canvas if you need a reminder)
Past Student Examples
Joy* introduced herself as “adopted from China at 11 months old by my single White mom and my older sister, not blood-related, was adopted when she was 6 months old.” Joy situated her lower-middle class, single parent, transracial family upbringing as privileged, having:
“grown up in very diverse, accepting communities (race, SES, religion, etc.) regarding both neighborhood and schools which are typically labeled as places that should be avoided. This has privileged me both in learning from people with all different types of backgrounds and shielded me from more explicit forms of racism as a person of color”
Depicting a large, smiling mouth with the corners held up by two fingers, the image visualizes Masha’s statement within The Dark Matter of Love (McCarthy, 2012), “Sometimes I feel bad, but I don’t want to confide in anyone, then they would also become sad. I want everyone to think that I am happy.” The documentary follows the Diaz family’s adoption of three orphans from Russia. Masha was eldest of the three, having spent her life (11 years old at adoption) growing up in a sterile, underfunded Russian orphanage. Masha arrives in the Diaz family stoic, hiding her vulnerabilities and fears, unwilling at first to show her emotions, give and receive love, and unable attach to her new adoptive family. Joy explained how her chalk art envisions the week’s curriculum deepening of her understanding of adoptee identity:
This week’s material reminded me of how we as humans perform emotion management, especially as a shield . . . adoptees tend to have hidden emotions about their adoption and hidden traumas of abandonment that they either may not have been aware of or actively try to hold inside . . . adoptees may try to manage their emotions because of their desire to be loved yet have a fear of being abandoned again. Because attachment was disrupted at an early age, it can be difficult to create a new attachment to another person. However, appearing ungrateful or being vulnerable may lead to fear that the adoptive parents may not want you anymore . . . [and] may lead them to feel that they have to constantly put on a happy face in fear of being abandoned once again.
Gabriela identifies as a documented, Mexican-Puerto Rican American who takes pride in her Latina identity. Gabriela joined the course having attending heritage camps for adoptive families for 15 years, first as a presenter’s daughter, but having “grown to love and belong to this community,” she continued to attend as a camp counselor. “Passionate about this topic,” she positioned her entry into the course as: “hopeful [that] with my anthropological lens, I can better understand the culture of adoptive families . . . and see the ‘hidden’ world of adoption.” Gabriela took the course to “make an effort as a non-adoptee to educate myself to be a better mentor” and “learn to be an ally and supporter to all my adopted friends and continue to help educate others who don't know much about adoption.”
Gabriela’s chalk art depicts how the The Dark Matter of Love (McCarthy, 2012) deepened her understanding of adoptee identity: “From the documentary I learned that we develop our identity slowly. Masha initially has a disconnection with her emotions yet towards the end we find out she was able to cry. This is a way of Masha growing and adding a ‘tile’ which advances her as a person.” Representing an adoption mosaic, Gabriela’s drawing shows the complex and multifaceted nature of adoptive identity (represented by the various individual tiles), but when brought together creates a beautiful, interconnected whole (represented by the mosaic). Relating this concept to her own identity as a Mexican-Puerto Rica Latina woman, Gabriela writes:
In my "mosaic" I added tiles of things I have developed and grown in . . . The center is me and there are parts that I have actively worked to develop, one being understanding my culture. I represent this by coloring flags and places I have been. I left some tiles blank as I am in the process of developing.
Mia* was interested in the course having grown up with her family-friend’s adopted daughter from China. Positioning her background as one “of privilege being White and an educated individual,” Mia hoped the course would increase understanding “of myself and others around me, especially in regard to the adoption process . . . By learning more about adoption and marginalized groups in this class, I hope to broaden my own lens to be more inclusively intelligent.”
Mia’s image illustrates an adoptee in the adoption fog (Lifton, 2002), which likens adoptees’ suppression of adoption-related trauma and dissociation of feelings of loss, grief, and anger to atmospheric fog. The concept was introduced by the week’s adoptee guest who talked frankly about how the course initiated her journey of processing her adoption , suppressed trauma, work with an attachment therapist, and ultimately lifted her own adoption fog.
