Institutionalizing Culturally Responsive Practices
Widening Your Sphere of Influence
Just beyond your sphere of control lies your sphere of influence. A person’s sphere of influence is made up of all the things that we cannot directly control but that we may be able to change by our actions. The actions of the families we serve and the EI practitioners we work with are in our sphere of influence. When we are coaching caregivers, we know that we have to be conscious of the caregiver’s interest, capacity, and priorities when we recommend developmental strategies. When we make recommendations that are not realistic for the family or do not align with the caregiver’s goals for their child, they are less likely to follow through. The same approach will work with your colleagues as you work to push their practices in a more culturally responsive direction. I’ve successfully swayed folks by starting in very small ways that aligned with their interests. For example, I know that recommending a book or movie in a genre that I know they already consume will help practitioners acquire knowledge about one of their client populations. Others may be more inclined to follow your lead to a training or into a reflective practice group. Storytelling and experience sharing in conversations are also an effective way to impact the way that our peers practice. I find that funny stories where I highlight mistakes and how I learned from them are more welcome in conversations than stories about the times I was amazing. Those stories leave less space for peers to relate to your experience.
Some of us have access to policymakers or advocacy skill sets. In these situations, our sphere of influence becomes broader. We may, slowly, be able to get big changes enacted. In these cases, we can’t control what those policymakers do, but we can work to guide or pressure them into making systemic changes (like changing the required developmental assessment. Just like in your one-on-one interactions with peers, storytelling is a very effective advocacy tool. One of my colleagues at Salem State, Carlie Pierre, always says, “There’s always a person behind a policy. Who is that person?” Once we know who that person is, we can isolate the best strategies to open conversations with that person to change the policy (For a great example of advocacy and some how-to guides, see Zero To Three’s Advocacy Resources).
Just outside our spheres of influence are our spheres of concern. These spheres are where all the laws, policies, and actions of others that we cannot control or influence are situated. In my work, this is where state laws that prohibit Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts or outlaw critical race theory in educational settings. This is a big challenge to institutionalizing culturally responsive practices in our work. In these cases we have two options. We can accept the limitations of our spheres of control and influence and focus our efforts on what we can do. Sometimes we can find creative ways to respond to laws and policies in our sphere of concern. Our personal responses are always within the sphere of our control. I like to think of this as finding a third space. In communities, a third space is one where people of different cultural backgrounds and identities can mingle with one another like a park or a library. In terms of culturally responsive problem solving, I consider a third space the work around we can come up with that abides by the law or policy while also addressing the ways that it doesn’t meet the needs of our culturally diverse families.
One EI agency I worked with was able to find a third space after their advocacy attempts to change the state’s approved assessment tool failed. EI practitioners had a mandate to use a tool their practitioners knew from experience wasn’t culturally appropriate for many of the Haitian, Portuguese, and Indigenous Central American communities they served in their catchment area. Faced with a culturally unresponsive assessment tool, agency leaders listened to the stories their EI providers told about the ways they explained the assessment and assessment results. The leadership realized that many of the individual EI providers had found a great way to explain that this is one test that was developed to assess the development of children that fit into the dominant American culture; therefore some of the test items were not appropriate measures of their child’s development. Leadership worked with these providers to create a set of talking points that assessment teams would address with families during their IFSP meetings and a template for a one-page addendum that assessors would complete using a narrative to describe the children’s functional skills. Family feedback to these responses was largely positive. Some providers reported they felt that having the conversation about the cultural unresponsiveness of the state-mandated assessment helped open lines of communication about what family cultures need and how to navigate cultural mismatches between the provider and the family.
Reflective Tool: Identifying Your Spheres of Control, Influence, and Concern
