In the 2010s, Wendy Bradshaw, a practicing EI developmental therapist, recognized the need for formalized guidance around culturally responsive practices when working with families. Bradshaw undertook a research project to learn more about the ways that other EI providers worked to build culturally responsive skill sets.  Based on this research, Bradshaw developed a grounded theory Framework for culturally responsive EI service provision.  The original framework included examining one’s own culture, acquiring knowledge of client cultures, building culturally competent practices, and reflecting on and evaluating one’s practices. It’s with Wendy Bradshaw’s blessing and encouragement that I’ve updated her framework to include developing a foundational understanding of socio-historical context in which you are providing services and the need to institutionalize culturally responsive practices.  I’ve tweaked the original framework components slightly to reflect a change of focus from cultural competence to cultural responsiveness. Though each aspect of the framework is listed and defined discreetly, this is not a linear process or one in which you can complete one component, check it off permanently, and move on to the next. Rather, much like in the building of a house, each component must be present and stable for the structure to hold.

The updated framework includes the following components.

1. Developing a foundational understanding of the socio-historical context
2. Examining one’s own culture and identity
3. Acquiring and Applying knowledge of family culture(s) to Build Culturally Responsive Practices
4. Reflecting on and evaluating the cultural responsiveness of one’s practices
5. Institutionalizing culturally responsive policies and practices

Developing a Foundational Understanding of the Socio-historical Context

As we know from Bronfenbrenner (1979; 1992; 2005), all development is context-dependent. Our field is great at thinking about the ways that a child’s environment and context can impact their development. Still, we don’t always explicitly make the connection in pre- or in-service training about the ways that our socio-historical context shapes our development as EI providers.  In my journey, I realized that I couldn’t be truly culturally responsive to my clients and university students without cultivating a deeper understanding of the societal and historical context of the United States (where I live and work).

It wasn’t until I gained insight into the socio-historical context of the United States that I began to understand the ways that the macro- and chrono-systems  impacted how I interact with families, how families view me and feel about working with me as a representative of a government program, and the power dynamics at play in all our interactions.

For example, in a recent conversation with one of the moms I worked with in EI, Letia, she shared that she loved her EI team because she felt that “they never made me feel stupid when I asked questions.” At the same time, Letia shared that there were many occasions in which she didn’t ask clarifying questions when the EI providers offered new information because she “didn’t want them to think of her as just another Black, teenage, singlemom who didn’t know anything.” Letia shared that these feelings weren’t directly related to her providers, but rather her lived experiences as a young Black woman in the United States. At the time, I didn’t know enough about the sociohistorical context to fathom that Letia had these concerns about how we may perceive her, let alone address them with her.  I believe that her experience in EI would have been less stressful if I had. My ignorance of the stereotype threat Letia experiences is a direct result of the sociohistorical context we live and work in.  Marginalized people are impacted daily, while those of us who fit into the dominant culture can remain blissfully unaware because it doesn’t impact us and most of our schooling doesn’t include it in the curriculum.

Examine One’s Own Culture and Identity

Bradshaw defined examining one’s own culture as “ EI providers [taking] an in-depth look at their own cultural values and beliefs” (2013, p. 5). I agree with this definition and offer the addition of examining how our own cultural values and beliefs impact our beliefs about child development and child rearing, why we opted for careers in a helping profession, how we conceptualize our role in EI, how we interact with families, and how we communicate with others.

As a member of the dominant American culture, it’s been challenging for me to pinpoint exactly what my culture is.  Barbara Rogoff (2003) likened this to being a fish swimming in water.  For me, as part of the dominant group in the United States, my culture and identity are all around me – much like how a fish only knows water and therefore couldn’t explain what it is. I developed a cultural identity without ever having to acknowledge how my cultural background impacts the way I communicate, how I conceptualize time, or why I think it’s important to encourage babies to complete tasks like feeding independently. I’ve noticed that this lack of cultural awareness is common among those of us that fit into the dominant American cultural group – we rarely need to acknowledge or articulate what our cultural identity is, so we’ve never given it any explicit thought. Conversely, members of nondominant cultures and marginalized groups have always needed to know how their own cultural practices differ from those of the dominant one so that they are able to adjust their usual behavior to fit in at school, at work, or in American society as a whole.  Although people belonging to nondominant or marginalized identity groups are often more aware of how their own cultures impact their day to day behaviors, this doesn’t mean that they don’t have to engage in deepening their understanding of their own cultural identity.  It simply means they have a head start in the process.

Acquire Knowledge of Family Culture(s)

Bradshaw defined this aspect of culturally responsive EI as learning about the cultures and cultural practices of the families you are working with. This is not as simple as it sounds.  We often get referrals for families that have very little details about them other than names and home languages. Once we schedule our first visit, there is very little time to do research about families before stepping into their homes, so many of us rely on Routines Based Interviews (McWilliam, 2009) or other conversational strategies to learn more about families’ ways of being so that we can engage in Family-Centered Practice.

 Family-Centered Practices have been the industry standard in early intervention since I joined the field.  In this way, many of us already have a disposition toward learning as much as we can about a family’s daily routines and child rearing practice. Often, we’re taught to acquire this information by questioning families about their lives and routines.  While asking families is certainly an effective strategy to learn about a family’s culture and ways of being, I’ve spoken with multiple families who found the constant expectation of having to explain exhausting and alienating. Each of these families stated they would have appreciated it if the providers came in with at least a baseline knowledge of their ways of being. If this has been the case, providers could have asked specific questions that showed their investment in learning about the communities of people they work with. Instead, several families shared that they felt their providers didn’t care enough about them to even complete a cursory google search. I offer that part of acquiring knowledge about family cultures is to do research about your community and catchment area proactively. If you know who lives in your community, then you’ll know what cultural groups you need to learn about and you’ll have more time to acquire meaningful information about them. Then, when you get a last minute referral for a family, you can enter into the relationship with a baseline understanding of their ways of being that demonstrates you value them enough to share the responsibility of learning about them with them, instead of expecting them to educate you about the ways they differ from you.

Determine and Implement Culturally Responsive Interactional Practices and Strategies for Support

 This component of the culturally responsive early intervention framework is what my peers and I have been calling the “just do it” phase. As you acquire more knowledge about a family culture and ways of being, you’ll need to adjust how you communicate with families, what learning strategies you offer, and what skills you work toward. For example, as you’ll read later in the book, I often introduced myself to new families with a verbal introduction and a firm handshake.  Once I learned more about Jewish Orthodoxy, I knew that Orthodox men don’t touch women who aren’t related to them. Another example would be the ways that Claire adjusted feeding therapy with Adrienne and her daughter Oneida. Initially, Claire used her go-to strategies with spoons, purees and thick liquids with varied success. Then, one day, Claire observed the other children in the home eating a communal meal with their hands as many West African families do.  Claire immediately ditched the spoons, took Oneida to sit with the other kids, and worked with her to use her hands to scoop and share food. These strategies were culturally responsive for the family, empowered Oneida to be a part of her family’s mealtime routines, and ultimately, led to faster progress.

Reflect on and Evaluate the Cultural Responsiveness of One’s Practices

Maya Angelou famously said, “Do the best you can until you know better.  Then, when you know better, do better.” This is why reflective practice plays a critical role in the culturally responsive early intervention framework.  Blanchard and her colleagues (2021) state that acknowledging and confronting our biases is integral to reducing them in ourselves and within the systems and institutions in which we provide EI home visits.  Additionally, we can use the reflective practice process to isolate particular challenges we face in the field, ask families or peers for critical feedback, and determine a more culturally responsive way forward. There are many great tools available to help you do the work of identifying and confronting your biases (See Bell & Schatz, 2022; Saad, 2020; Jackson & Rao, 2022). You’ll also need to do this work interpersonally.  This may mean with the help of a supervisor or critical friend, or even in community with the families you serve. In her book, Pause and Reflect: Your Guide to a Deeper Understanding of Early Intervention Practice, Childress offers helpful sentence stems and conversation starters to aid in getting truthful and useful information from families upon which you can reflect (2021).

Institutionalize Culturally Responsive Policies and Practices

Blanchard and her colleagues offer suggestions to advance equity through systems change at the macrolevel by addressing institutional belief systems, laws, and policies (2021). As early interventionists, I doubt many  of us regularly consider the ways that our individual interactions with families are actually happening at a systems level.  Each of us, when we go into a family home is a representative of our local, state, and federal Early Intervention systems. In this way, each time we adjust our own practice to a more culturally responsive or equitable one, we’re actually making small adjustments that impact multiple families engaged in the Early Intervention systems we work in. For example, when I was an EI service provider, I learned that many of the self-help/adaptive and motor skill items on the Hawaii Early Learning Profile were not culturally responsive to some of the families I worked with.  In many of the Korean American homes I worked in, children were spoon fed for longer periods of time than their White American counterparts.  In many of the limited income homes I worked in, families potty-trained their children much earlier than in homes in which the cost of diapers was not a concern.  The motor skills section included items related to pedaling a tricycle and going down a slide, which children in Chicago had limited access to during our cold, snowy winters. Each of these considerations could have had ramifications in terms of the development ages assigned to children as a result of evaluation and assessment. I opted to include statements in the narrative section of my assessment reports explaining the cultural mismatches between test items and a family’s daily life. This seemingly small change in my practice had the potential to impact each of the 325 families I worked with over the course of the ten years I spent in EI.

Further, many of us are in leadership positions with power to change agency policies, professional development offerings, EI credentialing requirements, and college early childhood education curricula. Once we’ve done the individual work of learning about the sociohistorical contexts in which we work, examining our own culture, acquiring and implementing culturally responsive knowledge and skills, and reflecting on our practices, it’s imperative that we apply what we’ve learned to influence equitable changes throughout the system.

How to Use This Book

We’ve structured this book to have a dedicated chapter to each of the components of culturally responsive early intervention service provision. The beginning of each chapter provides a definition of the component, background information, and recommendations on moving forward. Each chapter also contains a series of case studies related to putting these components into practice. All of the case studies in this book reflect the actual lived experiences of the author, content editor, EI providers or families that shared their stories with the authors.

The case studies are intended to be a reflective tool.  Each case study is formatted with the actual event, a list of reflective questions, and a set of links to learn more about a group of people or an EI-related topic. The questions are designed so that you can work on them intrapersonally by journaling or interpersonally by discussing them in a small group, with a trusted colleague, or in reflective supervision.

After each case study, there is a list of linked resources.  Most of the links are to resources connected to family identities, though some case studies offer links to more academic sources to explain concepts.  For example, in one of the case studies about Ibraheem’s family, he comments on not knowing which of his family’s identities was the cause of people’s potential prejudice. This brings up the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), so we’ve linked resources about the theory and how to apply it.

We’ve included the linked resources because the more information you have about a group, the less your brain relies on stereotypes and implicit biases to fill in the blanks. After each case study’s reflective questions, you’ll find a variety of resources with which you can engage to learn more about the topic or group in the case study. We’ve worked to ensure that there is something for everyone- blogs, social media influencers, podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books, journal articles, television shows and movies, artwork. We hope that you’ll engage with at least some of these resources to learn more about ways of being different than your own, with the end goal of creating a more expansive conception of what it means to be a “typical” American.  The cultural groups represented in the book are limited by the contributing authors’ experiences and research data.  It’s certain you’ll need to interact with members of a cultural group not included here.  We hope that you’ll take it upon yourself to find ways to learn more about them.  One of the benefits of the social internet is the availability of diverse content creators that are likely within a subject area that already piques your interest.  I love to read, needlepoint, and ride horses.  By expanding and diversifying the identities of the authors I read and the embroidery and horsemanship Instagram accounts I follow, I’ve deepened my understanding of nonbinary identities, Orthodox Judaism, Palestinian cultural practices, the lived experiences of Black equestrians, and many others.

Please keep in mind that no one can (or should) give you a guide on how to work with any one group of people.  After all, no group of people is a monolith.  There are as many ways to be a member of any cultural, linguistic, religious, or identity group as there are members of that group.  Rather, the purpose of these resources is to help you expand foundational knowledge about groups of people you may not encounter in your personal life. Again, the more you know about a group of people, the less your brain fills in gaps of knowledge with stereotypes.

Almost all of the resources we link to are created by and for members of the community represented by them. The authors, artists, and content creators linked in this book are sharing their own personal experiences, cultural beliefs, and ways of being.  Some may express views that we, the authors and editors, and you, the reader, do not agree with or may find problematic. When seeking to understand others, especially in the context of engaging in culturally responsive early intervention home visits, it’s key to develop an acceptance that their views and ways of being may be in opposition to your own.  In these situations, we find that avoiding or censoring views that we disagree with drives a larger wedge between us and the person we’re engaging with.  One of my favorite mantras when working with folks I don’t always see eye to eye with is “No one can learn from you if you think they suck” (Aguilar, 2013)