Acquiring and Applying Cultural Knowledge
Building Knowledge about Surface, Shallow, and Deep Culture
As you read in chapter three, there are multiple levels of culture. The first, surface culture, is what you’ll mostly be exposed to via social media reels and a lot of the available movie and television shows. Learning surface culture won’t give you as much insight as you’ll need to be fully culturally responsive to your clients, but it will give you a starting point to ask more informed questions. As Adrienne mentioned in her interviews, starting from a place of generalized knowledge about a community enables you to ask targeted questions that don’t make families feel as though you want them to tell you everything about themselves without you doing any of the work to learn about them.
When I was first working in Orthodox Jewish homes in Chicago, aspects of surface culture were the easiest for me to catch on to. It took me a while to learn the shallow cultural aspects of frum Jewish culture and longer still to fully grasp the deep cultural aspects of the various levels of Orthodoxy. For instance, there are rules prohibiting physical touch between unrelated men and women that those raised in the faith just know. This prohibition meant that not only could I not shake hands with men when I met them, but that rather than handing a baby directly to her father, I had to learn to put the baby down on the floor, in a bouncy seat, or in a crib so that the father and I wouldn’t accidentally touch while passing the baby. Unfortunately, I didn’t pick these kinds of rules up from just observing. When I was doing home visits, these were the kinds of things that I often learned only when families explicitly explained them to me, though I wish that I had built enough foundational knowledge to have known what kinds of specific questions to ask or what conversations to start so I could learn more. It takes time to build a level of trust with families so that they feel comfortable telling you more about these deeper aspects of their home cultures, especially if you are a member of the dominant culture and the caregivers are from a marginalized culture.
Through years of my own practice, there were two strategies I found effective when working to build the kind of rapport in which marginalized families feel comfortable sharing more about themselves and their family routines and culture. The first is to demonstrate my investment in their family by asking specific questions that demonstrate at least a basic understanding of their surface culture that is immediately relevant to their concerns about their child’s development (and not just things that I wanted to know because I am a naturally curious person). Many of the families we work with have had lifetimes of engaging with members of the dominant culture who didn’t acknowledge cultural differences or expected assimilation. Although Hammond’s culture tree model shows that surface culture carries with it a low emotional impact on trust, my experiences with families have shown that by expressing commitment to honoring those surface-level aspects of culture, families are more likely to trust you with deeper, more emotionally significant aspects of their family cultural and belief systems. Crenisha said, “You were interested to really know about us, You asked questions about Ibraheem’s [Yoruba] tribe which made me put my guard down with you. .”
The second strategy I found effective was to share pieces of myself with my clients, using a concept popular with social workers and occupational therapists called intentional use of self which you will read about in detail in the next section.
Lastly, it’s important to note that some aspects of deep culture, including whether a community values independence or interdependence, how they conceptualize disability, or how families view education and expertise can be very hard to ascertain upon first meeting. While we have to work to avoid stereotypes, there is value in learning generalizable information about the deep cultural beliefs that communities in your catchment area may share. In recent years there have been multiple scholarly articles published in Young Exceptional Children and The Journal of Early Intervention that provide insight into effective early intervention strategies that may be effective with specific racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups.
For example, Luna and Schwartz (2024) offer strategies for providing culturally responsive, values-based early intervention coaching through the use of The Familismo Coaching Model. They recommend focusing on the common Latine values of Interdependence, intergenerational families, personalized, caring relationships, and the value of respecting elders while also cautioning that “practitioners must also intricately walk the line between knowledge and essentializing a family based on their racial/ethnic/linguistic makeup. Each practitioner can use rapport building to determine where each family lies in their emphasis on these values.”
