New Families, New Texts: An Exploration of Viewing, Text, and Schooling from the Perspective of Being an “Other Kind of Family”

Canadian families are growing increasingly diverse, but the texts that children encounter in their worlds of home and school do not always reflect such changes. Using Carrington’s (2002) descriptions of new families, juxtaposed with autobiographical reflection and qualitative data from a survey of international adoptive families, I examine how texts of popular culture and school can include and exclude children of counternormative families, addressing how new literacies of the Internet have emerged to provide alternate locations for support, information, and representation for such families and children. This article concludes by exploring some ideas for providing more inclusive possibilities in schools.