I’ve wanted this book to exist since I started working in EI in 2008. When I was a new development therapist (Illinois’ version of the EI practitioner who provides special instruction), I was wholly unprepared to deliver culturally responsive services in family homes. I went in, as so many of us do, armed only with good intentions and a solid (white, heteronormative, English-speaking, dominant American culture) understanding of child development but absolutely no training or guidance as to how to be culturally responsive. I had some vague notions about cultural competence but hadn’t done any of the necessary work to understand the socio-historical context in which I was providing early intervention services or even to understand my own cultural identity and its impact on how I viewed child development and child-rearing. It was only when I made obvious gaffes that I began to seek out guidance on how to be more culturally competent in my work. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much directly related to how to do this work in early intervention or even in the context of home visiting.

As you’ll read in some of the case studies from my own early professional experience, this lack of information led to a lot of culturally destructive behavior. I wish that I could report that this kind of cultural destructiveness was limited to families’ interactions with me, but that is not the case. Studies show that Black families are five times less likely to receive EI services, and when they do, they experience more challenges and negative interactions with EI providers than their White, English-speaking counterparts (The Education Trust, 2021).  Many families reported not having their home cultures understood or respected by their EI providers (Evan, et al., 2016). Spanish-speaking Latino/a/e families detailed a mismatch between typical EI practices (coaching, limiting sessions to interactions only with parents) and family cultural practices and beliefs, as well as misunderstandings on the part of the EI providers about the diversity of Spanish dialects (Castillo et al., 2023). These research findings are echoed in the stories of the families we interviewed for this book. Our field knows that we need to make a shift toward culturally responsive practices to increase equity (Blanchard et al., 2021; & Crabbs & Freeman, 2024 ), but there hasn’t been much in the way of guidance for how we can do this. As Adrienne Thomas, a former EI mom, said so well, “There is no roadmap to cultural competence except the life that you live.”

Thankfully, I’ve been able to draw on my lived experiences providing EI and facilitating professional development and the lived experiences of the families and providers who contributed to this book’ and my research projects. This collective wisdom, paired with a growing body of research from the early intervention field, enabled me to update Bradshaw’s 2013 framework for Culturally Responsive Early Intervention to provide the guidance that I, and many others, have sought.

What Does Cultural Responsiveness Mean?

Geneva Gay (2010) defined culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (p.31). Essentially, instead of expecting all children and families to fit into the dominant American cultural ways of teaching and learning, we should adapt our teaching and learning to be more inclusive of all students and families.

While the initial theory of cultural responsiveness comes from the public school space, its tenets can and should be applied to early intervention practices.  This is especially true as early intervention practice centers on a coaching model in which EI providers work to build family capacity through coaching interactions.  Although we may avoid directly referring to parent/family coaching as teaching, the goal of early intervention coaching interactions is for family caregivers to acquire knowledge and skills with our guidance, which is, at its core, teaching.

Before we can work toward being culturally responsive early intervention providers, we need to understand what it means to be culturally responsive and where the concept of cultural responsiveness came from. The move for more culturally responsive pedagogy originated in a movement for public schooling to move from deficit-based perspectives of students outside the White, English-speaking, middle-class dominant culture to resource-based perspectives that sought to identify and activate the assets Black students brought with them into the classroom (Paris, 2012; Harmon, 2012).

Throughout most of American history, our educational system focused on assimilation and operated under a deficit model of education wherein the educational system views ways of being outside the dominant American culture as obstacles to be overcome (Paris, 2012;  https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1056428.pdfHarmon, 2012). Examples of this include the federal Native American Boarding Schools, which beat Indigenous children for using their heritage languages, bilingual public education bans in California, Massachusetts, and Arizona passed in the 2000s, and the research and teachings about the “culture of poverty” which assert that poor, often Black, people’s values and cultural practices are the reason they are living in poverty.

When test scores and other metrics found a gap between the academic performance of White students and Black, Latine, Indigenous, and students of color, the gaps were explained using a deficit lens (for example, the widespread teaching of the “culture of poverty” and how it impacts children’s ability to achieve academic success). Black, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous education scholars pushed back on the deficit-based views of students and their academic achievement. (Paris, 2012; Harmon, 2012).  These scholars focused on the ways that the cultural mismatches between minoritized students and the curriculum, teaching methods, and behavior expectations led to academic opportunity gaps. They found that in schools where Hawai’in (Mohatt & Erickson, 1981), Black (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Perry & Delpit), and Latine (Moll, 1992; Moll, et. al, 1992) children excelled, the teachers used language patterns similar to students’ home language style, held high expectations for students, identified and valued their perspectives, and understood students’ funds of knowledge and activated them when introducing new concepts.

In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings, a Black education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” ,which outlined the teaching strategies of successful teachers of Black students. Ladson-Billings defined these practices as Culturally Relevant Teaching. These strategies included holding high expectations for students, adopting curriculum and pedagogical practices that reflect students’ cultures and lived experiences while also teaching them how to navigate the culture of American public schools, and empowering students to identify, analyze, and problem-solve real-world problems and inequities.

After Ladson-Billings’s seminal work on culturally relevant teaching, other scholars, including Geneva Gay and Zaretta Hammond, expanded Culturally Relevant Teaching using the phrase “Culturally Responsive Teaching.”  According to Gay, culturally responsive teaching requires that teachers have a strong knowledge base about the culture(s) of their students, hold expectations for all students, integrate and contextualize curriculum that is relevant to their students’ lived experiences and cultural backgrounds, become adept at cross-cultural communication, and connect learning activities and examples to student’s prior knowledge.

In 2012, Django Paris argued that educators must go beyond just being culturally relevant to prioritizing culturally sustaining pedagogies which focus on perpetuating and fostering students’ languages and cultures as part of the public school experience (2012).

When discussing culturally responsive teaching, it’s common for folks in the education community to use the phrases culturally relevant teaching, culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, and culturally sustainable pedagogy interchangeably.  While they are not exactly the same, they are interrelated and come from the same goal of asset-based teaching. A large body of research supports their efficacy (Hammond, 2014; Byrd, 2016; Larson, et al., 2018; MacKay & Strickland, 2018; Piazza, et. al., 2015). The framework for culturally responsive early intervention presented in this book pulls these concepts out of school-based instruction and applies them to working with families with children with disabilities in their homes.