Session 1 | Bridging Voices: Building Comunidad

I think I—you weren't able to hear me. Welcome, everyone. Gracias por acompañarnos. Bienvenidos. I just was saying my name is Christina Villanueva. I am a bilingual school psychologist that has been with Parallel for about three years. I am truly excited for today's presentation: Building Comunidad in Multilingual Practice that we are partnering with. The Hispanic Caucus. And so I am really excited for this presentation, as this is one of my true passions of working with multilingual populations and the multicultural. And so as well, just a reminder that this is part of a 3-part series that brings together just different disciplines to explore Culturally responsive and trauma-informed practices. And so I will go ahead and also go through some housekeeping reminders that to please remember that you must attend the entire live webinar. Attendance is tracked through Zoom and no partial credit will be awarded. Please ensure you joined using the email address associated with your registration. Complete and submit the self-assessment evaluation within 3 business days. The deadline is Wednesday, March 4th. For ASHA CEUs, please indicate that you would like to receive CEUs and provide your ASHA ID number on the post-webinar. We do encourage questions throughout the presentation, so please feel free to drop those in the Q&A box, and we will address them. Within common themes at the end of the presentation, and now I will turn it over to Leslie to introduce the speakers.

Welcome everybody! Thank you for being here. So today, of course, we're bringing together bridging voices, building comunidad in multilingual practice. Today we'll be talking with session 1, Interdisciplinary Professionals as Agents of Equity in Multicultural Settings. So before we get into session 1, we briefly share who we are, the Hispanic Caucus for ASHA. We are uniquely diverse comunidad with roots across Latin America, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central, South America, and Spain. Our mission is to address the issues of diversity in our field while increasing resources, research, and Spanish-speaking professionals to better serve our communities. In this learning series, the experiences of, of voices of multilingual, multicultural, and Hispanic/Latina professionals, students, and families are centered. Conversations about equity and systemic barriers may bring some discomfort. That is okay. The invitation is to stay curious, listen deeply, and notice what you might be called to rethink or do differently, while always knowing that it is okay to step away and take care of yourself as needed. We are deeply grateful to tonight's presenters for their dedication to this work and for sharing their expertise with all of us. So a special thank you to Dr. Sandra Guzmán and Nia Thomas.

Thank you.

And through this partnership with Parallel, we are here for representation, advocacy, and best practices that uplift multilingual and multicultural learners, families, and professionals. If you'd like to stay connected with the Hispanic Caucus, please do so by scanning the QR code on the screen. You can visit our website, follow us on Instagram, or send us an email. We'd love to stay connected. And without further ado, I'll pass it on to Thomas.

Good evening, everyone. I am in real time practicing managing the slides and presenting at the same time. Thank you all for being here. Welcome. We are so happy that you made the time for this important, important learning. And we're really excited to not just share, but to learn from one another, because that's what this work is about. And so my name is Nia Thomas. I was born and raised in New York City. My family heritage is rooted in the Dominican Republic. Spanish was my first language. I am a sequential English language learner, and so I didn't learn English until I started school. And I am currently a bilingual pediatric speech-language pathologist. I am also the founder and creative director of Bilingual Speech Resources. And what's beautiful— in a moment, Sandra will introduce herself— and what's beautiful about this presentation tonight and why I was so excited about this partnership is because we are presenting with 2 different lenses in terms of my being a speech therapist and her being a psychologist. But we have— we're very aligned in our approach and in our goals in the work that we do to be agents of change and agents of furthering equity in our fields. And so I come, my entire career has been based in New York City in urban communities, in multilingual communities, not just students that speak Spanish because that is easy for me, quite frankly, or well, we'll talk about the nuances later, but it is easier for me when kids speak Spanish. But I currently have students on my caseload who are bilingual Mandarin, bilingual Ukrainian. Throughout my career, I've had many different dialects of Spanish, but also bilingual Burmese, bilingual Cantonese, bilingual Filipino— or I'm sorry, not Filipino, Tagalog. And so I have a lot of experience with multilingual populations. I have a lot of experience with seeing how these children are over-referred for being English language learners, or they're over-referred because of their socioeconomic status. or their cultural backgrounds. And we'll talk a lot as the presentation goes on more about that, but we just wanted to give you a quick intro into where our lens is coming from. And so I am very passionate about culturally responsive pedagogy as well as neurodiversity-affirming practice, and I do a lot of guest lectures and workshop facilitations on this work. And I'll pass it over now to Sandra.

Oh, excuse me.

No, I have to do my disclosures. I am being compensated for this workshop. I receive an honorarium for today's speaking and workshop, and I also receive a salary from the Department of Education. I am fully employed by the Department of Education, and I have no other relevant non-financial relationships to disclose.

Thank you. Okay, so my name is Sandra Guzmán. Besides the identities, I am sorry, my pronouns are she/ella. I am a bilingual school psychologist. I have a doctorate in school psychology. And apart from, you know, my identity is also strongly rooted in motherhood and sisterhood. I am also raised in the border of Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. We immigrated when I was about 10 years old. Currently, my roles, Mostly, you know, I am teaching at New Mexico State University. I am also supporting through research. I am really passionate about research in the sense that we need our voices to be out there. We need our— we need updated stats. We need updated information, not just to put a number on our children, but to really understand our children and know how we are going to base our work. And so, With that, currently I am a bilingual evaluator in New Mexico, K through 12. Like Nia said, in order to really understand kind of where our lens is coming from when we speak about culturally and linguistically diverse children, you know, understanding kind of where also we come from and where we're serving. I particularly serve rural and the borderland area currently in New Mexico, but I've done it in California as well as Colorado. Because of my location in rural and borderline New Mexico, our state really has become really strong in the sense that we may not have necessarily the providers, but the providers that are there can get additional training. And so I've been fortunate to get support through the state, particularly for ASD bilingual educational evaluations, as we do have our families having to travel to Arizona sometimes or have 2, 3-year waitlist. As I mentioned, because of my framework, and particularly in the research into juvenile justice, you will see that I speak a lot about trauma-informed and a social justice lens. To me, it is really important that you all understand the, the lens that we see when we are working with our students. And, and so we will, we will keep going. That, can you do the next one, Nia? Same. I also, I'm receiving an honorarium from Parallel, and I have no other relevant financial disclosures. Okay. So as you know, you're here today in comunidad and gathering, and we're— we want to understand those systemic barriers. When we understand that within the population of culturally and linguistically diverse children and their families, there's gonna be community settings, school settings that can really make it difficult for our children not just to succeed, but maybe to even empower themselves and self-advocate as they move on from public education or just education in general. We will also be describing the biases that can occur when we assess, when we intervene with our students. And lastly, we will wrap it up by demonstrating our family-centered culturally linguistic responses that put together overall honor the family language, the preferences, and as practitioners, we can increase advocacy and overall engagement in our community. Oh, I'm sorry, this is my— this is today's agenda. And then we'll move on. Okay, so I want you to take a moment, if you could please scan the QR code with your phone, or you can open up a tab, feelingwheel.com, and we're gonna have a moment for an emotional check-in. As Leslie earlier stated, things might move around us, and it's good to put a name on it. It's good to Explore it as practitioners and providers, maybe students. Maybe you are just learning about this information. And so take a moment to jot down three emotions that you feel right now. You might also feel a little exhausted, you know, but that is okay. It is part of the process. And so you are able to drop it in the Q&A box, I believe, if you would like to share. Otherwise, just keep it in your notebook. Maybe you write it in your notes, and I am we are going to do about you know. 30 seconds more of you doing that, but feel free to share if you feel comfortable.

And as you are jotting your emotions down, I just want to reemphasize what Saundra shared about why it is important to do this. It may seem silly or disconnected, but everything we are modeling, we are modeling because It is this— these are the practices that you should be doing with your students. It is part of good practice when we are working with the populations we are working in, really with any humans, but especially with those that are culturally and linguistically diverse, because you really cannot do any learning or reasoning or anything, reach any of the goals that we are working on until you are first regulated. And that is why it is so important to find where you are.

Did anybody share? Oh, I think Q&A. Okay, so thank you so much for sharing. We have first from Lisbeth, frustration, stress, tired. Anonymous, confused about assessing multilingual students. Thank you so much. We're hoping that we can answer that for you, or, you know, alleviate some of this confusion that's there. Melissa, interested, accepted, peaceful. Graciela, optimistic, peaceful. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Someone anonymous, tired, sleepy, but busy. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you for your check-ins.

This is, this is, a lot of these things are real. We do not expect everyone to be, first of all, it is a long day. I am sure many of us have worked today, and it is important to be honest and transparent. It is also, if you are working in a school setting or with children, Very heavy IEP season, parent-teacher conferences. There are a lot of things that pile up on our desks, so this makes sense. And hopefully the presentation today will— if you just take away one thing from today that you're going to try, we hope that it will alleviate and bring some hope into your practice. And so we'll start with our first check-in on that note, and we wanted to ask you, we're going to pull up a poll here and you'll be able to Click into which option you'd like to select. And the question is, what barriers are you facing as you serve your students and clients? What barriers are you facing as you serve your students and clients? And our options are A, systemic safety and/or funding issues. Then we have staff miscommunication and/or lack of family inclusion. We have staffing ratios and/or staff burnout. All of the above. And if you— there is something outside of any of these that you'd like to add, you can drop it in the Q&A section and we'll be able to see it.

So, so far, the results, we do have almost 50% of you saying all of the above. And so I feel that, right, Nia? We've had long conversations about this. And so we thank you also for being here because this opens up great conversations and even what can we do next. We're not— we're never supposed to stop learning.

Yes, and we will do our best as we start our presentation. We have— there's a lot of information— not to spend too much time on systemic barriers because we know what the barriers are. We want to spend more time on the strategies, so bear with us. But when I'll start out with the language barriers, right? A lot of times in the work that we do, even in medical fields, in every field, there is clinical vocabulary that's specific to that field, which then becomes jargon to the families. So the other day I had a principal, my principal, ask me if I knew anything about intraverbals. And I looked at her and I was like, I've never heard that term, or at least maybe I have 10 years ago. I don't remember that term. I don't know what that is. And when I looked it up, it was as simple as the ability to just answer a spontaneous question. So someone says, how are you? You say, I'm good. That's an intraverbal. We should never be using jargon when we're talking to family, but oftentimes, for many reasons, people want to feel like they earned that degree, or they feel like this is the way you have to talk in a professional setting. There is a lot of jargon used, and that is really a barrier for a lot of our families in understanding where their children are, where their students are. And so that is definitely a barrier that we face. Another barrier when it comes to multilingual populations is the concept of translation versus adaptation. It is now, thanks to technology, pretty easy to get things translated, right? We have Google Translate, we have a few other apps that I'll talk about later, uh, PowerPoint has live translation. I don't know, I don't know if any of you knew that, but that's pretty awesome that I can be speaking and the slides will in real time translate what I am saying. To another language, and that's great. It's more than we used to have, but some things don't always translate, and we know this as multilinguals. And if you don't know this, even just being in the, in the field of language, we know that sometimes it takes a whole sentence to explain one word in another language, or some concepts just don't fully translate, or they're not culturally relevant to families, and in terms of how they see structure and authority and all these different things. So that's another barrier we face. And one of the biggest barriers I've seen throughout my career is the misidentification of a language disorder when it is either a student learning English or a student with limited vocabulary because of their socioeconomic status, or for a lot of families, especially immigrant families, students with interrupted formal education that we sometimes call SEIF. So for whatever reason, they were, uh, You know, they had to go from country to country to country to get here, or state to state to state. They have interrupted formal education. And so when we do these standardized assessments, which we'll talk more about again briefly, of course they're gonna come up as having language disorder or some kind of disability because they haven't had the exposure to the academia that they would need to pass these tests. And Sandra is going to speak a little bit more about the cultural considerations and the mental health and the stigmas.

Okay, thank you, Nia. So for— yeah, thanks. For culture, okay, so when we, again, talking about culturally linguistic and diverse students, we have to consider culture. And so it's not just about ticking a box, hey, I have cultural competency, I met my ethics code. No, we want to move away from that. And in reality, Consider what is cultural humility, where we practice some form of self-reflection. It's going to take us an openness to understanding. We we have to take the time to learn about the culture. It takes work. It's also going to take some unlearning that maybe those assumptions that I had about this particular culture, and it also going to maybe have to be taking away all those old narratives or maybe. I am influenced by somebody else's perception of this culture. While cultural humility also asks us to acknowledge the power and the imbalance that exists within society. And again, these are the systems that we work when we work with. And again, if you consider culture, you also have to consider the intersectionality of the child and their family, including immigration stories, trauma, and this idea of acculturation. Am I here? I am from there. Or I'm from both, you know, trying to find that identity. And as Nia mentioned, in some of these cases, when working with culturally and linguistically diverse students, we will be the monolingual provider. And so what is my confidence using interpreters or the tools like Nia mentioned, and how can I seek support? In addition, we notice mental health stigmas. We know that surrounding the stigma of mental health, regardless if we are in a school setting or not, it still disrupts the early identification and treatment. As mentioned, we do see the over- and under-identification in special education. And for example, in the state of California, in Santa Barbara County, we know a report from 2020 told us that Latinx students are likely 3.43 times to be identified as having a learning disability than their white peers. And so as a result, they've had to do some repair. In the state of New Mexico, we have an over-identification of emotional disturbance. And so part of our training is really to focus certain hours where we lock them Separately of our training with children under the exceptionality of emotional disturbance. Overall, the stigmas in the mental health can also complicate the trust that can happen in the therapeutic relationships. Think about when you send your consent forms, your big packet, sometimes depending on the state where you work in, you might even have information there to sign them for Medicaid, you know, and so understanding what all those implications means, what consent means. And knowing what, for instance, psychological, psicológico, what that means for some families. And unfortunately, even though it's 2026, some of the systemic barriers is funding. As the New Mexico Public Education Department in 2025 reported that rural New Mexico school districts lost over $65 million for the mental health services. And so we have to understand that it's still being overlooked at and You know, even though we're— like I said, we're in 2026. Go ahead, Mihamm.

All right. And finally, standardized assessments are a huge systemic barrier for us. There's an overdependence on them. They were not created for multilingual, multicultural populations, and they are consistently over-identifying this population as having a disability when often what we're really looking at is disrupted education or second language acquisition. So, Sam, just gonna start us off with a bit of a silly check-in before we get into some of the meat in here, the good stuff.

So yes, please use your poll and then just hypothetically think of like something fresh, something funny. It's late, we're tired. And so if you could choose a cartoon character Would that you would describe as your, as your best friend? And here I put just some, some tidbits. So we know that SpongeBob is funny. He's almost childlike, innocent. Scooby-Doo, you know, as a dog, he's loyal, but he's also a foodie. Hello Kitty, she's fashionable, but very optimistic about life. And we all know Elmo, an explorer, very empathetic. So yeah, just let us know by clicking on the poll which one would be your best friend.

Okay.

Thank you all. Oh, and then this is my part. Okay. So I will be, Nia will also come in and chat about it, but I am going to talk a little extensively about how can we reduce bias in what we do, particularly as a school psychologist. My focus a lot is assessment, and I also provide school-based psychological services. And so we want to discuss As you're listening to this and maybe a student, a kiddo comes to mind, I want you to ask yourself, was this assessment, was this intervention I tried culturally and linguistically valid for this child?

Okay, so we wanted to start with a really quick case study, and it goes alongside with the question that Sandra just asked. As I mentioned earlier, even within Spanish, there are many dialects of Spanish. And so I'll never forget first getting a student on my caseload who was from Honduras, and there was a lot going on. And so I'm just getting to know her, I'm assessing her informally. We'll talk a little bit about informal assessments and dynamic assessment. And she's talking to me, and I asked her what she likes to eat, and she mentions she likes to eat mariquita. I don't know if you speak Spanish or where you're from, but for me, mariquitas are ladybugs. And I had to like control my eyes from popping out of my face because I was like, oh, that's an interesting thing to eat. But I kept it moving. I said, oh, you like to eat mariquitas? That's great. We're chatting, we keep talking, getting to know each other. And then later on in the day, I looked up mariquitas, but I put the country that she was from. And immediately a bag of plantain chips came up and they were called mariquitas. You know, and it's just a quick study to show, and this happens so much, especially when we look at standardized assessments, even assessments that you give in Spanish, right? And some of these assessments have gotten better about giving exceptions, but there are so many different dialects that we have to remain curious and really think about if a student gets something wrong, is it actually wrong? What does it mean for them? Is what the are the materials that I'm choosing and the strategies that I'm choosing culturally and linguistically responsive to who I am working with?

Okay, the the chat is disabled, but somebody asked in the in the comments. But you could type in in the Q and A.

I believe.

Okay. So with the purposes of time, you know, there is a YouTube video that you can scan using your phone and maybe just put it there for watch later. And so, as I mentioned, the work that I have been doing, I have been doing mental health for the last 15 years in various settings. But there was a way where I really could not put together the systems that are happening. They were also happening for myself in my own identity as a, as a Latina, but they were also happening within the children that I was working with. One of the things that I noticed is that some of the children in the juvenile detention center were coming in with a learning disability in reading. And I said, how did we get here? And so that is where I learned about intersectionality. We want to give credit where credit is due. This is by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw from 1989, an attorney. who noticed that the experiences for Black women were very different than in the system, in the carceral system, were very different for Black men, for white men, for white women. And so within intersectionality in mind, we have to notice that culturally and linguistically diverse students have various identities. For the children that I have worked with, I know that race, language ability, immigration status, their Indigenous heritage, and their socioeconomic status play a big role and how they are perceived, their mental health, their behavior. Because intersectionality will also tell us what is your positionality as the person that is assessing the student in front of you. You want to pay attention of how that interacts. With that, I am also noticing that I have to be trauma-informed, that I have to acknowledge that even though we want to be from here, from there, and acknowledge both cultures, we also have to know the history. There's been indigenous boarding schools. There's English-only policies that if you look up in your state, you might be surprised how recently speaking another language was still criminalized. And then currently, we have to be honest and know that we still have anti-immigration laws and an anti-immigration narrative that really impacts our communities, where there's a forced cultural and linguistic assimilation, when in reality we want acculturation for our students to look like an embrace of their multicultural identity. However, we don't deny The fear, for example, that ICE may be causing. That if I show my student a picture of the Washington— of D.C., it might have a different feeling for them than they would for another student. And so you see a picture over here of Chicana author, poet, queer advocate Gloria Anzaldúa. In one of her very prominent books, Borderlands, she talks about nepantla. So nepantla is this in-betweenness when we are existing between cultures, we're transitioning, we're transforming. But she also talks about the conflict that happens there and how sometimes our kiddos will use things like Spanglish, for example, in order to still resist and keep their language in some form. And you'll see how this can show up in assessment and how you can be culturally responsive to that as well. And so, when I was in— during my training, I really wanted my doctoral training to emphasize and become a bilingual psychologist, as Nia said, it's not just that Spanish comes easier, but also there are other implications of being a bilingual psychologist that I knew that I had to be aware of. In particular, how acculturation can show up in the work that I do daily. So if we were to assess for language proficiency, some might misinterpret it as it's a language delay. The student, they might still say it's nonverbal, they're not speaking, but actually if we look at a culturally responsive way to consider this, we're going to assess language proficiency in both languages. Sometimes even if there hasn't been education in Spanish or in another language. We'll talk more about this, but we use informal assessments, we're going to use other information that's going to help us understand. We're going to use assessments that could, for example, let our student that told me instead of bicicleta, they use the word bica, I know what that means as a Chicana, but If I were to use an assessment that wants me to just use bicicleta, I would have to count that one wrong. And is that truly fair for my student? As we know, as school psychologists, when we work within community settings, we send out rating scales. And it would be nice if, you know, you can just send it out and get it back, but we all know that's not true. But when we do get it back, at times we do have some teachers where you do see that Elevation in their, in the, in the validity scores. We may see a teacher that they say, well, they are not compliant. Maybe we see that withdraw, the withdrawn behavior is up. We might see that they have low adaptive skills. But we have to understand the culture, that there might be a cultural mismatch. I have had students who come from countries where corporal punishment is still used by teachers. And so they have a really hard time connecting with their teacher because of this trauma that they have. Sometimes when we, like I said, we wanna give out packets to parents, we realized sometimes they don't even open the packet, it's not back. So we might think they're disengaged, they're difficult to work with. Well, let's consider that parent-child cultural gap. Parents might be surviving, trying to get food on the table. And so we have to understand the priorities of the family as well as how this really could impact the trust. And so we want to base our information not just in standardized, but also including things that could help us with a narrative approach, such as using their language. So knowing that this papayo, like what that means, like it means more than just in shock. And then in academic achievement, we could have teachers that see it right away as a cognitive rigidity, as a processing issue, or as a learning disability. We have to understand where our students are in the sense of, are they first generation, second generation, and that maybe there is this idea of not wanting to make mistakes, and so they're not really truly showing their abilities. And the next slide.

And so You can scan the QR code. This will also be sent to you as a follow-up. Again, there's so much material to cover. Unfortunately, an hour is not enough, but very much how we're seeing similarities between acculturation and what can be seen as disability. It is no different when it comes to learning a second language. And so this is the original document came from Janet Klingner, who has done a lot of research in the speech and language pathology field in terms of what second language acquisition looks like, and there's a lot that happens in second language acquisition that can look like a disability. And so this form was originally from there, and I translated it as well into Spanish. It's a great resource to share with families when they're struggling or other people are telling them their child has a disability, you do not agree. This is a really great resource to share with families, and it will be sent to you again afterwards. Feel free to take a look, but we're not going to go over it in depth today.

Okay, thank you. Okay, so what does this mean overall in the assessment? So we want to shift this narrative that we've we've had for some time where we're just going to rely on these standardized measures, this number that we want. Yes, we want— we know that the numbers are important eligibility purposes, insurance purposes, but we're also gonna use a more equity base where we have time to do self-reflection. We consider how we see disability. So for example, something that I think about often is how many Mexican, many Latino America families see children as perfect just the way they are. They are un regalo de Dios. And so there is nothing wrong with them. We give our children time. We, we take them to other practitioners first. And so understand what, what it means to have a disability in a different, in a different culture. And then we also want to use more relational language, as Nia said, kind of getting rid of that jargon and more on the strengths-based as opposed to Here, what are your child's concerns, the deficits? You do want to get information on that, but you do not want to lead with that, with that approach. And then next one. Okay. So in assessment, this is just like a quick example, but we know already through IDEA, through our own ethics codes as psychologists, through APA, we know that We are going to use assessments that are normed for your population. So, for instance, the WISC, it does not mean you get rid of the WISC, but you are not going to use those verbal-heavy components, and you are not going to use those components that you know are answered best when the child has been in the US for some time. For example, I do not expect most of my students to be able to answer, where is the airport? Or, have you seen an airport? As sometimes they have never seen that. Versus the DAS, and I'll talk a little bit more about other evidence base where my students can answer me in a different language, and then I can also provide a 1 for those responses. Go ahead, Mia.

Similarly, in the field of speech therapy and speech pathology, a lot of people think, well, I'll just give the CELF in Spanish, right? If I give it in Spanish, then it's fine. But the reality is, and there have been studies I quoted at Barragan in 2018 that show that giving the CELF-4 in Spanish is about as accurate as tossing a coin when it comes to identifying, uh, speech and language disabilities. What it will do is often misdiagnose low socioeconomic status and second language acquisition as a speech-language disorder. So this is something really important to keep in mind, and if, if you're still using assessment, which there's a reason there's a CELF-5 English, and I don't believe they've come out with the CELF-5 Spanish. Um, you really— I suggest you don't, but you really should be supplementing it, and we'll talk a little bit more about what you can supplement it with in just a moment.

Okay, so when we talk about assessment, we know that both in, uh, speech-language pathology as well as in psychology, we can use narrative-based data where we have interviews in the native language. This is sort of where you try to use your community. Maybe there's somebody that knows this language who can help you. You use your interpreters, you try to find the information that's important to how to support your students. You also have multiple observations. You want to know what, you know, what are they speaking on the playground? Are they using a mix of both or just one? You want to not necessarily rely heavily so much, but you also want to make sure that you use the work samples. And then go ahead, Mia, on the following.

Absolutely. And so, and, and while narrative may mean something different in the field of psychology, I would say it is very relevant for us as speech therapists because one of the greatest ways that we can assess students is collecting language samples. And so I would look at that as more qualitative data. There was a study done in 2020 called— I could not fit all the authors, so it is just called Beyond scores 2020, you can find it. Uh, one of them is Dr. Fabiano Smith, and they talk a lot about converging evidence, which really just reinforces what Sandra just said about multiple sources of data. We should be using family interviews, we should be using language samples, we should be using dynamic assessment. Dynamic assessment— you can use any material in your hands, including the CELF-4 Spanish, although I'm not the biggest fan, right? And if you notice that your this student is getting these answers wrong, then what you do is you take the time to— you test, then you take the time to teach. Can, if provided with exposure and practice and an opportunity to actually learn something, and you retest, how quickly can they pick up this new concept? I know that— I think there's a basic concepts subtest on the, the Self-Report Spanish, right? So dynamic assessment takes more time, but it is more accurate to try and figure out, is this a student with interrupted formal education? is this a student learning English? Have they never heard that word before? Or, or it is a different dialect, or is this a student with a disability? And I will let Sandra finish out with the acculturation and trauma.

Thank you. We, we want to be able to assess and gauge where acculturation is at with our student. There are very informal ways, but there is also the ASQ-3, which will ask you to kind of know how many years they have been in the country, like what languages they speak in with their families. And then trauma. Although we do not necessarily want to have like a standardized score, like we know the trauma history, sometimes these assessments can also help us give the adults working with children know exactly how trauma is impacting them overall. So, to give you an example, just yesterday my colleagues and I did a workshop against teen dating violence. And one of my colleagues mentioned that the students that he was with, were very chatty, maybe saying inappropriate things, laughing. And really, it turns out that the teachers wanted to vote to discipline the students. Well, after speaking with my colleagues, we really noted like this is a trauma response. We are talking to children from an alternative school setting about violence within communities where maybe all they have seen is violence within their And so, again, not to necessarily put a number on this trauma, but also to help those adults see, hey, this is really impacting them socioemotionally, and, and, and be able to advocate for your students when you know that, hey, this student has huge trauma responses, and that is why they are behaving this way. OK, and the next one. OK, so these are best practices. This is a lot of information for the next 2 slides. You will have the opportunity to download this. And so, although these are best practices, I will want to highlight the ones that have worked for me in my practice with culturally and linguistically diverse children. On the left, you will notice some citations. I do want to point them out. When I was working on my literature review for my dissertation and finding frustration that I could not find anything updated on the school-to-prison pipeline, for instance, well, my professor from New Mexico State, Dr. Ballard, She really said pay attention to those dates because it tells you when it is being looked at and if it is being funded. And so you will notice that we do see a 2025 citation. Well, this is from autism in CLD children. And so we know that that is being researched, that is being studied. I can say in my state of New Mexico, we are being trained. But when it comes to language proficiency, cognitive ability, academic achievement, we still see that we are in the 1990s, the 2000s, And so this is where we may not have the evidence to back it up as strong as autism. And so this is where we talk to each other, where we build community between multilingual practitioners. And so go ahead if you want to start with the language, Nia.

Absolutely. So we talked a bit about dynamic assessments. We— I explained the approach of test, teach, retest. Another great— and there's a lot of there is a decent amount of research in this, uh, dynamic assessment is non-word repetition tasks, but not the kind we typically see in the standardized assessments that are popular. So not numbers, because again, or letters, because if a student is learning English, they may not know that letter system. If they have interrupted formal education, they may not know those numbers. And so non-word repetition tasks literally just give sounds, nonsense words, that, that a student can repeat back to you, and there you can score it from there to look at their working memory, to look at how they're able to capture phonemes and phonological patterns and give them back. The LEADERS Project based out of Teachers College, Columbia University has a few non-word repetition tasks for free that you can download, and they have them in a in a few languages, right? Because if you're looking at a bilingual Spanish or, um, I can't remember right now, maybe they have Arabic. I know, I know for sure they have Mandarin. Um, then you're gonna need to know some of those sound patterns in those languages to accurately assess. That's the reality of the situation, right? But these non-word repetition tasks are a great supplemental dynamic assessment when you're doing, um, when you're doing assessment on multilingual, multicultural populations. And again, language samples are another one. SALT is one. It's not one I particularly use, but it is one that a lot of people use. Out of the LEADERS Project, there is also what's called SLAM cards, so School Language Assessment Measures, and those come in a couple of different languages. They have picture cards that you can print. They also have them on cards, and they come with a scoring criteria. So you can really look at the grammar and the syntax and the cohesion of these language samples that you're collecting. Sandra, I'll let you talk a little bit more about the Woodcock and the BVAT.

Yeah, like I said, I'll just highlight as we are kind of, you know, with time in mind. And so to highlight in the language section, I do want to highlight the WMLS. It is in Spanish and English, and I feel that they're both very useful and helpful to understand where my student is at. And even if your student is stronger academically in English, in the other language you could even get more narrative information. So, for instance, I've had children where written expression in English is very cookie-cut, you know, things that they've learned in the classroom, but when I ask those same questions, but now in Spanish, I get a full story, I get imagination, I get emotion. As a psychologist, I'm assessing for emotional awareness the entire time. And so, I've seen those kids that probably sit with their moms watching a novela, or children that are listening to aunties chisme, where again, one prompt can really lead to a narrative approach of a language survey. With cognitive ability, we understand and we know that we cannot just rely on nonverbal measures, although we do have them. We have to also find other ways to assess students. I do find that the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children is friendly, as you are able to do Spanish instructions and children can answer in other languages. Earlier I mentioned the DAS. It has been renormed so that it also includes children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The Early Years in Spanish. This is assessment that I found that really helped me assess acculturation because you are really playing with the child. I do want to note for our Afro-Indigenous or Afro-Latina children that LARRI-P is involved in— look, cases in education such as LARRI-P is involved in California. This is where you have to use other assessments that can support what you are looking at. You are not— depending on your district in California, you are not able to use anything that says cognitive, intellect. And so this is where you talk to your colleagues, you get creative. I will say that the TAPS is in Spanish as well. The VMI, we all know this one for motor, in vision and motor. The Rammel attention. And then a lot of my colleagues really enjoy the NEPSY where Larry P. involved, Larry P. Law is involved. For academic achievement, you know, we're not gonna get too much into it, but informal ways to measure assessment, from my understanding, is that the FAR, there's gonna be one in Spanish to measure reading, but it hasn't come out yet. So if you are bilingual, I believe you can sign up if you wanna start, you know, helping out with norming. That's also something that we can do, you know, as advocates. support so that it is normed within your area, for myself in the Southwest. And then we also understand that adaptive emotional and behavioral assessment will show differently. One area that I know is, is that the BASC is really great. It is in Spanish as well, but it is long. And depending on the trust, depending how my student is feeling, the Pierce Harris might just be something easier as it is just a yes or no. The child, the child can nod, or you can put Post-its, For autism, we know that it was renormed, the ADOS, and so now we can use it with culturally and linguistically diverse students. But I prefer, I like the MIGDAS as it gives me options for a narrative, open-ended, when I can have conversations with family. And what does this behavior that I may be pathologizing really look like?

And what I will add here is especially for academic achievement, and if you're not doing an initial evaluation or triennial, if you are— someone's— a child is already on your caseload or they're in your building for academic achievement, I really encourage clinicians to use the assessments that the classroom staff is using. So if the classroom staff already has to give a literacy benchmark, offer to do it for that child because you have a different lens. And so they might be like, oh, this child gets gets everything wrong, and you come in, maybe you provide some translations, maybe you provide some adaptations, maybe you provide some visuals, and all of a sudden the student does show an understanding of the material. And so that's something that we don't talk enough about— using the assessments for academic achievement that are already being used within the school structure and bringing in your lens and your clinical opinion and expertise.

Okay. So I am going to, you know, briefly talk about Yoli. Their pronouns are she/they. She is multilingual. She identifies as nonbinary, of Indigenous heritage, Rarámuri, which is in Chihuahua. And the exceptionality that she came in with is emotional disturbance. The referral that I received for school-based psychological services was because she shuts down in class, she does not participate, and she is experiencing psychotic episodes. There is history of trauma, and she is first-generation. And so, as I, we, I discussed reducing these biases in intervention, I think a lot about Yoli and the things that I did with her to sort of process what she would interpret as her angels appearing to her during school hours. You might notice that, that, you know, that could be fearful, but we found a way to empower her as she did feel that her Her angels were actually protecting her, were messages from her ancestors, and not to pathologize once again. And, and also because we needed to find ways where she could still be integrated in class. Okay. So in the intervention process, we want to foster safety. That is the major thing. We want to be able to foster growth, language development, by respecting the religious and spiritual understanding of what wellness is, what grief. For my student Yoli, for her, was depending on the face of the angel was how the day was going to go. So we really had to sit down and process what that means for her. We value traditional knowledge, storytelling, crafts, that we know that some of our students have other practitioners such as sobadores, curanderos, and we don't You know, judge that process for them.

Go ahead.

We're by being trauma informed, we understand that immigration comes with experiences, come with stressors. For Yoli, we really use journaling to be able to tell her story through what are called testimonios. There's also programs like social emotional programs such as She Notchly. What really is that? But the idea that if we give the child the appropriate soil, so we think of children as seeds, if we give them the soil, the right water, the right fostering environment, that they're going to grow. And sometimes our students do better when we allow for art, music to happen in our sessions. We know that drumming helps our students with ADHD and ASD regulate, but we also know that that is an Indigenous practice that has been going on. And so we rebring these moments. We know that even tapping through different textures can help our students self-regulate and return back to class, as one thing we do not want to do is retraumatize our students.

OK. And now we have gotten to the final section of our presentation tonight, and that is family-centered and culturally and linguistically responsive practices. And so our last poll for the night is here, and the question is, how does your organization involve families in intervention and assessments? So the poll is going to pop up. We want to know, are you using family interviews? Are there family and community events? Is there ongoing communication, or are there other things that your organization is doing to involve families? families in the intervention and assessment process? Okay, a majority of these organizations, your organizations, are using family interviews. Very low for family and community events. I hope that we can advocate to change that. And ongoing communication is, is there. All right. So practices that work. These are based off of the work of Karen Mapp. And I am going to tell you 3 practices, give you some examples, and then we are going to go right into Q&A because I know there are a lot of questions and I want to be mindful of time. And so one of the first things that we can do to invite families to be more than just engage, but to actually— oh, like they show up, they come sometimes, and sometimes they don't at all, but to actually convert them and transition into them being partners. We are partnering with families in making sure that our students are as successful as they can be. And so a lot of the organizations I have worked in have family coordinators Family coordinators are very helpful in aiding communication in both directions. They, they are able— they usually speak the language, and they also just have a lot of rapport with the families so that we can find out why are there so many absences, how can we support you, what's your biggest need right now. Also, did you know that this is going on? You should bring your child to this event. On the weekends we have this, after school we have this. So family coordinators are great wherever you can advocate for them. Also parent support groups and coffee hours. These are all flyers and snapshots from things that happen at the current organization that I actually work at. Our school has weekly coffee hours, and one of the greatest ways that you can advocate for this and make it successful is putting parents or families in charge of these groups, as opposed to it always being the organization staff that has to do it. There are parents that want community, that want to be involved. Find those parents, find those guardians, and give them authority to create these support groups around what the needs are in that specific community. In our community, there is an autism family support group because there are a lot of children with autism in our organization. And it is a place weekly where people show up, and there's not always an agenda. Sometimes there are speakers, but a lot of times it's just families sharing and saying, this is what we're going through this week. And another family saying, oh, we went through that last year, or we're still going through that, or it'll get better, or it may not get better. But it's really a space that sustains itself because the families are running that. And for the most part, all the organization has to do is aid with maybe some marketing and provide them a space for them to do it. Programming that leans on family strengths, food, and culture. So I have seen great success. One of my greatest memories from elementary school was a huge cultural dance where every class had a country and every country had a dance that represented it. All of the families came. It was in the back, in the schoolyard. Everyone was watching. There were cameras. It was such a joyous event. And so when we think about the programming, that we're offering to families, we want to lean into their strengths. Potlucks are great where people feel like they can come and share their food and their culture, and even storytelling hours where people come in and tell— families come in and tell stories from their culture are really great. My school also does an annual block party, which is a great thing that the entire community looks forward to, and it really supports— we support street vendors that are often parents of the kids that we work with. Directly. We support local businesses, a lot of people donate, and it's just something that the entire community looks forward to and everyone is putting together collaboratively. And then recently we've also started doing digital donation drives because we found that we have families that don't even have access to phones, whereas we have other families that have old devices in the house. And so we've been taking those donations, clearing those devices, And at the same time training families for alternatives, not shaming them, because we know that oftentimes excessive screen use is— it's not always a sign of lazy parenting, which I know is very common. Sometimes it's a necessity. When you're working 2 jobs, you have to go and make dinner, you hand the kid the iPad or whatever it is. Fine, if you have to do that because that is where your family is right now, then let us help figure out what are some better educational apps for your kids to be using? How can they be learning while using these devices? Not all screen time is the same. And so doing a lot of trainings around that is something we have also done. And it really removes the stigma and the shame of your kid is on the screen too, too long, you are a bad parent, right? That is not an inviting or sustaining space. Ongoing two-way communication systems is something that Karen Mock talks about a lot, multilingual, multimodal communication options. I work with a family whose mother has shared with me that she is not literate. She does not read in English or Spanish. So even if I message her in Spanish, it's not going to make a difference. And so now we exchange voice notes and that works a lot better for her. So really think about, again, this goes back to translation and adaptation. Translation doesn't always solve the problem. Now, There are some great apps out there. Our organization uses ClassDojo. I love it because it translates within the app. It's almost like a texting, um, social media platform. It's not open, you have to be invited, but the teachers can post in the classrooms, and then there's private messaging you can do with the parents, and it translates within itself. I have a Google Voice number that I share with families when I realize that that might even be too complicated. They can't figure out how to download the app and how get into the app, there are also technological barriers. And so a Google Voice number gives me a little bit of boundaries with my space but still allows me to communicate with families in a way that they will actually reach them. And then making sure that that communication is two-way, is not just us telling them there's an event, your child does this, here's the parent-teacher conference, but that we're eliciting information and we're using that information to inform our practice. So we talked about this today, send a picture. Let me know what they say at home. I take a lot of pictures of what I do with my students in therapy and just send it through ClassDojo just so they know what I did with their child. I don't have to write a lot. I don't have time to write a lot. We have way too much of a workload to begin with, but it takes me 2 seconds to take and send a picture that I can literally do right as I'm finishing up the session with that child. And then collaborative goal setting using family interviews and having the families help us set their classroom and IEP goals is huge. That's how we partner with families. Also, having students, as soon as it's appropriate and they're willing, participate in their own IEP meetings is a game changer. I just did this yesterday with one of my students for the first time in his academic career, and it, you know, there, there, it was difficult to keep a dry eye in the room. Everyone was very emotional. He had a lot of thoughts. He had a lot of opinions. He stutters. And he— I helped him with the sessions leading up to that day, put together a deck with images that meant a lot to him. And so he's very into boxing and, um, uh, what's that, uh, wrestling, wrestling. And so he, he picked a lot of the images and he presented in front of his parents and his teachers and his counselor and myself in terms of how he feels he's doing with his goals and what he wants to continue working on. And it was a really powerful moment, not just for him, but also for his family and his mother who was there. Okay, so this is our last slide, and we will go through it as quickly as possible, right? Together we can continue to advocate for— I know that there's a lot of things that do not exist. There are a lot of barriers. But if nothing else, take this screenshot. These are a lot of the things that will help, and we can continue— we have to continue to advocate for them. We need qualified interpreters. I think there was a question somewhere about, do you need someone who speaks the language to give the non-word repetition test?

You do.

And so we still do need interpreters, and qualified interpreters at that, not leaning on siblings and parents who may not be prepared to do that kind of translation or adaptation. We need multilingual evaluation teams. A lot of times right now it takes forever when it's a language that's a little bit harder to find to get these evaluations done, and in the meantime these kids go without services. We need to continue to advocate for visuals that are in multiple languages. I'm going to jump down to standardized assessments just so that Saundra can finish out with her 2 pieces and then we can go to the Q&A. We need to continue to advocate for reducing bias in assessment and intervention. I heard a lot of people saying, but I have to use the standardized test, and I want to challenge that a little bit. And if you can't because you're not in a position where you can challenge it, supplement it, supplement it, supplement it. Use other— take language samples, do family interviews, talk about how the standardized assessment is not normed on our population. I will— I have a excerpt that I put at the beginning of evaluations when I do that. If I ever do report scores, which I try not to, but if I have to, I make sure that that almost like that warning is at the top, right? These standardized scores are not fully representative of the child because this assessment is not normed for this population. But look at the IDEA. That is a national law, the Individual Disabilities in Education Act. What they actually say, and this is where I think you can push back, what they actually say is We need to be using assessments that are valid and reliable, not standardized. The word standardized is not used in IDEA. Valid and reliable. And if you have the position and the ability to speak up, I would speak up and say, the assess— the assessments that you have me doing that are here available to me are not valid and they're not reliable. I don't think we should be using them on this population. And then offer alternatives.

Yeah.

And we need to continue to advocate for, again, complementing the standardized data with other tools. Sandra, I'll let you finish out with cultural humility and mental health and stigmas.

Yes. And so we strive for, again, not necessarily the competency, but the being culturally, having cultural humility. We understand that maybe we need to be those advocates, those, that voice that wants this funding, that seeks it out, that co-treats, consults with one another. I, you know, and I think this whole series is about coming into comunidad, and particularly what our immigrant communities are facing right now. We advocate also for to do away with the stigma in mental health. Just so you guys know, and I'm sure you are very much aware, mid-May we have Mental Health Awareness Month. And so these are good opportunities for you to maybe sponsor those student-led mental health groups Giving students, empowering them so that they can, you know, they are the next generation. We are here to protect children. And so part of us is also giving those spaces so that students can lead groups. And with that, you know, you have our information that you can reach out.

Thank you so much for being here tonight. I know we have, we want to take a few minutes for questions. But please feel free again to reach out because I know that we won't get to all the questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sandra and Nia. Again, thank you so much for joining us today. We did run a few minutes over time, so we're not going to be able to move into questions and answers or Q&As this evening, but please continue the conversation. We encourage you to connect with Nia and Sandra on LinkedIn, Instagram, or through their website, and they have their emails right there for you. This This concludes the educational portion of our webinar eligible for the ASHA CEUs and the NASP CPDs. Please be sure to complete the evaluation survey within 3 business days in order to receive that credit. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.