Culturally Responsive Early Care and Education: Lessons from a Pueblo in New Mexico

This blog is part of the series, Learning from Diverse Indigenous Communities: Centering Culture to Support Child and Family Wellbeing. Read the intro blog to learn more about our work.

Across the country, early educators, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other loved ones are providing enriching care and education to young children, often under very difficult circumstances. Many devote particular attention to ensuring that their care is culturally responsive and supports the healthy identity development of young children, knowing that doing so will foster self-esteem, pride, and resilience—and lead to greater social and academic success in the future. 

The Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) recently conducted qualitative research to learn how caregivers provide responsive and nurturing care to young children, with a particular focus on how they promote positive identity development. The early educators and caregivers we interviewed live in urban and rural areas across the country and serve diverse families and communities. To support the healthy identity development of young children, they do everything from hiring teachers from the local community who speak the same languages as the families they serve, to celebrating holidays that honor family traditions, providing implicit bias training for staff, and conducting ongoing and sustained family engagement to build bridges between children’s experiences at home and in the classroom.  

A few early education programs we visited in Tribal communities go a step further in fostering the healthy identity development of the children they serve. Because Tribal communities have experienced forced assimilation over generations, with concerted efforts to eliminate their languages and erase their cultural traditions, promoting healthy identity development in young children often looks different in Tribal early care and education programs than in programs elsewhere. As the early educators and parents we interviewed in these communities told us, promoting healthy identity development for children in their communities requires actively cultivating traditions and revitalizing languages that many families may not practice or speak regularly or consistently at home. They emphasized that this cultural work is critical both to ensure their languages and traditions are sustained, and to enable young children to grow up connected to their communities, confident and proud of who they are, and prepared to face the future.  

While the contexts of early education programs serving Tribal communities are distinct, the deep and extensive cultural work that these early education programs undertake offers important lessons for early education programs elsewhere on how they can more effectively promote the healthy identity development of young children. 

Below, we share what we learned from one program serving a Pueblo in New Mexico about their approach to providing culturally responsive care and fostering pride and self-confidence in the children they serve—and highlight some broader implications for how early care and education programs can effectively promote healthy identity development in young children. 

Nurturing a Healthy Child by Embedding Cultural Affirmation in School Life  

This early learning program situated on a Pueblo in New Mexico is dedicated to nurturing the Tribal community’s children— providing both a cultural and an academic education. The program’s strong commitment to cultural education and affirmation closely reflects the Tribe’s philosophy that a strong cultural foundation is key to the development of a healthy Pueblo child who can contribute fully to Pueblo life.  

The program’s focus on cultural education shapes its decisions on a wide range of issues, starting with its pedagogical approach and curriculum. According to the Pueblo’s beliefs, each child has an “inner spirit” and “special gifts” that must be nurtured, and the school’s founder intentionally selected a pedagogy that closely reflects these values. Because the pedagogy was developed in a Western context, the program further adapted it to make it relevant to the children of the Pueblo, including by teaching children the Pueblo language, songs, values, and traditions.  

The school leaders thoughtfully design instruction in cultural traditions and language to connect children and families to the broader Tribal community and instill a strong sense of identity and cultural pride. Children do not take a stand-alone native language class, but rather are fully immersed in the language, which is elevated as a prestige language of instruction; no English is spoken for the entire preschool program. Likewise, children do not simply learn traditional songs and perform a recital; they are taught how to fully participate in important community events, such as Feast Day dances. According to school leadership, “it’s not just the community over here and then the school. We’re all in it together, and we’re doing our part to support the initiative of revitalizing the language and not [being] a separate thing or separate mission.” This partnership includes consultation with Tribal leaders, hosting community language events, and receiving Tribal resources and other forms of support.

The program’s approach to cultural education ensures cultural knowledge is passed on to the next generation, strengthens children’s connection to their Pueblo, and helps instill self-confidence and cultural pride in the young children they serve and protect them against feelings of marginalization that can result when children’s culture and identities are ignored, minimized, or disparaged. 

The Value Parents See in Culturally Responsive Care 

Parents told us they are drawn to the school because of the cultural education and affirmation it provides—explaining that they want their children to grow up connected to their community, proud of their identity, and with a strong sense of self. Briana, whose son attends the school, told us, “I’m proud of my culture and I want that for him. . . I wanted the language to persevere. . .That was why I took that [enrollment] packet, and I filled it out.”  

Some parents place such value in the cultural programming the school offers that they go to extraordinary lengths so their children can attend the program. Tina, whose son attends the school, told us that she commutes 1.5 hours each way so he can grow up connected to his community and steeped in its traditions. She explained that she had not received any affirmation of her Native identity when she was in school and struggled for years as a result. She was committed to making sure her son would not “feel the way I feel later on in life.” By sending her son to the school, she hoped he would grow up to be proud of his identity, and confident in who he is. To her, seeing her son do traditional dances whenever it strikes his fancy—including in public spaces such as the shuttle ride to school!—was evidence that the approach was working: “He’s got the rhythm and beat down already.”  

Lessons for Early Care and Education Programs Across the Country  

Early education programs serving Tribal communities operate in distinct social and political contexts and are more culturally homogeneous than many early education programs elsewhere, but their approach to cultural education and affirmation offers important lessons for programs serving other communities.  

One important lesson from this program’s approach is that actively supporting a child’s cultural identity means that cultural education cannot be a stand-alone or one-off activity, but it must be imbued in every aspect of the care and explicitly affirmed. For programs serving more diverse communities, the day-to-day work of cultural education and affirmation will look different than this Pueblo in New Mexico, but the key takeaway is that opportunities to affirm culture should be considered at every step of curriculum development, lesson planning, and programming.  Another important lesson from the cultural work of this program is that efforts to bring culture into early education programs should serve the larger goals of connecting children more deeply to their communities and fostering pride, self-confidence, and healthy identity development. To achieve these goals, working closely with community leaders and with parents and other caregivers is critical. Doing so can help ensure the lessons children learn in school are reinforced at home and in their communities, and that the early learning programs effectively reinforce the lessons children are already learning outside their doors.  

While the community contexts will vary, all early learning programs have an opportunity to connect children to their cultures and their communities, and foster self-esteem and pride so children can grow up to be healthy, happy, and successful.