Deborah Chen, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Special Education, California State University, Northridge (CSUN), teaches in the Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) programs. She also supervises ECSE credential candidates in early intervention and early childhood special education programs located in highly diverse communities in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. As an immigrant to the United States from Jamaica (West Indies) with Chinese roots, Dr. Chen has a personal and professional interest in working with families of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Dr. Chen has extensive experience serving with families and their children with sensory impairments and multiple disabilities as an early interventionist, teacher, program administrator, teacher trainer, and researcher. She has directed projects of significance, model demonstration, outreach, research-to-practice, and personnel development projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education. These projects have focused on working with families and children of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, home-based early intervention, interdisciplinary training, caregiver-child interactions, and early communication and tactile communication strategies with children who are deaf-blind. Her publications reflect these professional efforts and interests.
Dr. Chen has disseminated her work at local, state, national, and international conferences. In addition, she has been invited to conduct professional development courses and to present at international conferences in Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Qatar, Taiwan, and Thailand.
M. Diane Klein, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a professor of early childhood special education at California State University, Los Angeles, where she has directed the programs in early childhood special education for 30 years. In her early career, she worked as a speech-language pathologist with young children with disabilities and their families. She has directed numerous federally funded projects involving caregiver–child interaction, working with infants with low incidence and multiple disabilities, training of early childhood special educators, and training inclusion-support personnel (Project Support). Along with Anne Marie Richardson-Gibbs, Dr. Klein has produced a variety of training videos related to inclusion-support strategies for young children with disabilities in community-based early childhood education settings.
