Building Relational Infrastructure: Questions for a Moment of Transition
I came to early childhood special education because I wanted to work with very young children who adults believed were having a hard time—children who really just needed more individualization and differentiation than I realized general education teachers had training to provide (including myself). I wanted to connect with them and their families as a partner in their learning, to help them learn and love and laugh.
That relational pull—the desire to connect, to see children fully, to meet them where they are—brings many of us to early childhood work. Over 25 years as a teacher, researcher, faculty member, and consultant, I've watched that same desire drive dedicated professionals who implement evidence-based practices, attend trainings, seek certifications, and work tirelessly to support children and families.
But I've also watched practitioners struggle to sustain that relational capacity. Not because they lack commitment or competence, but because the infrastructure to support connection—to ourselves, to colleagues, to the work itself—often doesn't exist. Sometimes it hasn’t been built. Sometimes it's chronically underfunded—IDEA (2004), for example, has never been fully funded (Part C early intervention was level funded), leaving states and districts scrambling. And now, with federal offices responsible for oversight and implementation facing devastating cuts, it's being actively dismantled.
We're in a moment of transition—one that many are experiencing as loss, as threat, as the dismantling of protections fought for over fifty years. Systems that have shaped early childhood intervention and special education for decades are shifting in ways that feel destabilizing, even dangerous. The professionals who have long been leaving the field aren't just burned out—they've been infrastructurally abandoned. The children haven't long been underserved—they're bearing the cost of systems that were never designed to hold them fully. The fear is real. The concern for what's at risk is legitimate.
I'm not writing to dismiss those concerns—they demand our fierce attention and action. I'm writing because even as we fight to protect what's at risk, this threshold moment also asks us different questions about what we need to strengthen and rebuild.
What does it mean to approach this transition as learners building together rather than experts implementing solutions?
What Research Has Long Told Us
Over twenty years ago, Joan Lieber—who mentored me in this work—and her colleagues found that administrative support was one of the key factors influencing the implementation of inclusive preschool programs. Administrators who provided shared vision, collaborative planning time, and ongoing professional learning support enabled teachers to implement inclusive practices with confidence and competence.
This research established what many of us have observed: inclusion depends on more than teacher knowledge and skill. It requires infrastructure—conditions that support the challenging, relationship-intensive work inclusion demands.
The field has continued building on this foundation. The Division for Early Childhood's Recommended Practices provide comprehensive guidance across eight domains. Position statements on inclusion outline what quality looks like. These frameworks are valuable—they articulate what practitioners should know and be able to do.
But they largely leave something critical unexamined: how practitioners' own positionalities—their identities, experiences, cultural backgrounds, assumptions—shape their practice.
This is where scholars like Beth Harry and Maya Kalyanpur made pivotal contributions to my training. Their work on cultural reciprocity explicitly addresses how professionals' cultural values shape practice and calls for authentic examination of power dynamics in family-professional relationships. They gave us frameworks for the kind of reflective work that examining positionality requires.
More recently, developmental researchers have argued for moving culture from the abstract "macrosystem" into the immediate microsystems where development actually happens—recognizing that culture isn't something external that shapes us, but something we enact daily in our relationships and practices.
The interdisciplinary insights go even deeper. Universal Design for Learning—now foundational in our field—hails from architecture and engineering. Yet we've largely failed to bring those disciplines' co-design methodologies into how we build the systems themselves. Allison Druin's work on cooperative inquiry demonstrated that children aren't just recipients of design but legitimate design partners—equal collaborators in creating the technologies and environments they'll use. Juan Pablo Hourcade's research on child-computer interaction has further established design principles that center children's developmental needs, interests, and abilities. These scholars showed us that co-design with children yields better outcomes and shorter development cycles. What if we applied that same principle to building systems with practitioners and families as design partners?
These scholars have given us the pieces. What we haven't done consistently is apply these principles to how we build systems that support practitioners—in part because we haven't invited them to the table.
What I've Been Seeing
My team and I recently concluded a research study with NYC public schools examining disparities in preschool special education referrals and inclusion. Through this research, we watched administrators support families through every step of the referral process while simultaneously leading their programs, managing operations, and navigating what one administrator called "a constantly changing system."
We listened to teachers—novice, seasoned, and veteran—talk about their deep desire to support all children. They wanted to individualize and differentiate their practice. They wanted more collaborative planning time. They wanted support in doing this challenging work well.
We heard families describe the complexities of navigating system transitions, waiting for evaluations, trying to understand processes that often feel opaque.
What struck us most was what one teacher told me directly: "We find each other in a hallway... There's no time." Teachers wanted dedicated planning time to coordinate services, prepare for family meetings, discuss children's learning goals. One described arriving for a parent meeting about evaluation without having had time to meet with colleagues first—"we're all just saying stuff" rather than presenting a coordinated plan. Another spoke about having 19 children, knowing a child needed speech services, wanting desperately to help—"I don't have the time... If I take him and I sit down, then we have a whole bunch of other students left." The desire to support inclusion was there. The infrastructure to make it sustainable wasn't. The infrastructure wasn't missing because no one valued it. Limited resources and competing demands meant insufficient capacity and time to build the collaborative planning time and coordination structures everyone needed.
What struck us wasn't that people weren't trying. Everyone was trying incredibly hard. Administrators were creating program-wide timelines for screening and assessment. Teachers who were willing mapped their own educational experiences and re-examined them in an effort to better understand their commitment to inclusive practice. Families were advocating persistently for their children.
What was missing was infrastructure—the conditions that would allow all this effort to translate into sustainable, equitable practice that doesn't depend on heroic individual effort.
What Lieber and colleagues identified two decades ago remains true: administrative support matters enormously. But what's also become clear is that we're asking administrators and teachers to create and sustain inclusion without building the relational infrastructure at a broader systems level that makes collaboration sustainable.
What’s Been Missing
The field has frameworks for competence, standards for practice, recommended approaches across every domain. What I've seen less of—what seems perpetually under-resourced, undervalued, and treated as invisible labor—is relational infrastructure.
By relational infrastructure, I mean: the conditions, space, and support that allow people to bring their full humanity to this work. The structures that make it possible to examine our own experiences and assumptions. The pathways that help us connect authentically with colleagues when things are hard. The practices that build capacity to hold complexity, work across difference, and sustain ourselves in work that requires emotional presence.
The field teaches us to build relationships with families, to practice cultural reciprocity, to collaborate across disciplines. What would it mean to apply those same relational principles—co-design, participatory processes, authentic partnership—not just to how we work with children and families, but to how we build systems that support teachers in doing that work?
Why This Matters Now
Inclusive practice isn't just a set of strategies to implement. It's a way of being in relationship—with children, with families, with colleagues, with ourselves. You cannot sustain relationship-based practice without relational capacity. And you cannot develop relational capacity in isolation or through competency frameworks alone.
This transition moment—whatever emerges in terms of funding, policy, or organizational structure—creates an opportunity to ask: What if we built systems differently from the beginning? What if we centered relational infrastructure alongside evidence-based practice?
But this can only happen if we approach it as collective work—inviting the interdisciplinary expertise and practitioner voices that can help us build systems we've never built before.
What Collective Building Requires
Whose voices need to be centered as we design what comes next?
Not just the voices that have always shaped the field. Not just people who already know how to navigate professional spaces. But practitioners and families who've been marginalized—people told their concerns weren't legitimate, who had their expertise dismissed, who navigated systems that pathologized difference rather than adapting to meet diverse needs.
What does it look like to invite these voices not as token participants, but as co-architects?
How do we practice co-design in building systems—not just in serving children and families?
Co-design requires making invisible dynamics visible so groups can examine patterns together. It requires creating multiple pathways for participation. It requires building space for authentic dialogue about difficult topics—race, disability, class, neurodiversity, whose expertise counts.
It requires sustaining people as whole humans, not just professional competence. It requires approaching work iteratively—trying, learning from what doesn't work, adjusting.
This is exactly what the field teaches about working with families. What if we applied it to how we work with each other?
What does it mean to approach this as learners building together?
It means recognizing that different communities will need different approaches. It means being willing to not know, to sit with uncertainty, to build through genuine exchange rather than implementing predetermined solutions.
It means asking questions we don't yet know how to answer:
How do we maintain research rigor and equity commitments while building more responsive, locally-grounded systems?
What makes professional pathways visible rather than depending on already knowing unwritten rules?
How do we extend the same principles of inclusion we champion for children—access, meaningful participation, infrastructure supports—to how practitioners experience the field?
What allows practitioners to bring their full selves to work that requires emotional presence?
How do we support people without treating wellbeing as individual self-care rather than systemic responsibility?
What Relational Infrastructure Makes Possible
When I think about what supports collective building, I keep coming back to relational infrastructure as the foundation that makes co-design possible:
Making invisible dynamics visible helps teams see patterns in how they connect, who gets heard, where assumptions operate—so they can make conscious choices about what to shift.
Creating space for reflection gives practitioners regular time to examine their own experiences and positionalities as ongoing practice—developing capacity for the self-awareness that authentic collaboration requires.
Building multiple pathways for connection recognizes different ways of being in a professional community—allowing people to participate fully rather than performing in ways that don't fit them.
Centering authentic dialogue provides infrastructure for difficult conversations—space, time, relational safety—so people can engage complexity without defensiveness.
Sustaining practitioners as whole people acknowledges full humanity—struggles, needs, experiences beyond professional competence—creating conditions for sustainable practice. Models like Bank Street's Emotionally Responsive Practice demonstrate this work: approaches that attend to educators' mental health and emotional capacity alongside children's development, recognizing that we cannot pour from empty cups.
None of these are prescriptive solutions. They're invitations to approach system-building differently—with relationships at the center, with willingness to learn together, with commitment to practicing what we preach.
The Opportunity
This moment of transition is an opportunity—not to have all the answers, but to ask better questions together. Not to replicate what existed before, but to build what's been missing. Not to design alone, but to co-create systems that practice what we preach about relationships, inclusion, and meeting people where they are.
What becomes possible if we approach this as collective work? What becomes possible if we build with relational infrastructure as foundational rather than optional?
These are the questions I'm thinking about as systems shift.
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC.
