Description

Rooted in Indigenous public health approaches, this course examines how culturally grounded practice can

address systemic inequities in early childhood services. Drawing on +Language is Medicine, a culturally

grounded adaptation of Enhanced Milieu Teaching developed with Navajo communities, and ASCENDing

Beyond Barriers, which examines early intervention access and experiences among American Indian and

Alaska Native families, it challenges clinicians to move beyond cultural responsiveness toward reciprocal,

community-driven partnerships.

Learning Objectives

Participants who complete the course will be able to:

1. Identify at least three ways cultural values, Indigenous knowledge systems, and community contexts

influence communication development, assessment practices, and clinical decision-making.

2. Describe at least two strategies for integrating community knowledge, caregiver priorities, and culturally

meaningful communication practices into evidence-based assessment and intervention while maintaining

clinical rigor.

3. Apply a culturally grounded, collaborative decision-making framework to a clinical scenario involving

assessment or intervention, identifying appropriate adaptations, caregiver partnership strategies, and

meaningful communication outcomes.

Keynote Speaker

Joshuaa D. Allison-Burbank, Ph.D., CCC-SLP

Joshuaa D. Allison-Burbank, Ph.D., CCC-SLP (Diné and Acoma Pueblo), is an Assistant Scientist with the

Center for Indigenous Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he directs the

+Language is Medicine Research Lab. Before joining the Center in 2021, he worked as a speech-language

pathologist at Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico. His research focuses on community

assessment, caregiver coaching, and the prevention of developmental delay in American Indian children. He is

the principal investigator of +Language is Medicine, a caregiver-implemented early language intervention

developed with Diné communities that is now being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial funded by the

National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. He earned his B.A. in Speech and Hearing

Sciences from the University of New Mexico and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of

Kansas, and he has served as co-chair of the Native American Caucus of the American Speech-LanguageHearing Association.

Financial Disclosures: Joshuaa Allison-Burbank receives a salary as an Assistant Scientist with the Center

for Indigenous Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Baltimore, MD), with funding from

the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the National Human Genome

Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health (R35HG011319), MacInnis Family, the Annie E. Casey

Foundation, and the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions Pilot Award. Honorarium for this

symposium was provided by the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at Michigan State

University.

Nonfinancial Disclosures: None.