Trust, Belonging, and Early Childhood Education in Migration Contexts: India and South-East Asian Diaspora Perspectives

In India, early childhood spaces such as Anganwadi centres, preschools, and early primary classrooms often serve as the first point of interaction between migrant families and state systems. These encounters shape institutional trust, particularly in contexts marked by linguistic diversity, socio-economic inequalities, caste dynamics, and urban precarity. Globally, migrant and refugee children encounter early education systems that may either facilitate inclusion and belonging or reinforce exclusion through rigid policies, cultural insensitivity, or systemic discrimination.

This session will explore how trust is constructed, disrupted, and renegotiated in early childhood settings across diverse migration contexts. It foregrounds trust as a relational, contextual, and dynamic process—deeply embedded in everyday interactions between children, families, educators, and institutions. It also recognises that mistrust may function as both a barrier and a protective response, especially among communities that have experienced marginalisation, racism, or displacement.

Bringing together perspectives from India and other global contexts, the session will engage with interdisciplinary approaches from education, sociology, migration studies, and childhood studies. It will encourage comparative insights and cross-cultural learning, highlighting both shared challenges and context-specific practices in fostering trust and belonging in early childhood education.

We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Experiences of migrant and refugee children in early childhood education settings across different countries
• Internal migration (e.g., India) and cross-border migration: similarities and differences in trust-building processes
• Relationships between migrant families and ECE systems: institutional trust and barriers to access
• Role of educators and caregivers in creating inclusive, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed learning environments
• Language, identity, and belonging in multilingual classrooms
• Impact of policies (e.g., ICDS and NEP 2020 in India; global ECE frameworks) on migrant children’s participation and inclusion
• Structural inequities, racism, caste, and discrimination in shaping trust and educational experiences
• Community-based and grassroots initiatives that foster trust and solidarity
• Methodological innovations and ethical considerations in researching trust with young children in migration contexts
• Intersections of research, policy, and activism in building equitable early childhood systems

The session will also reflect on how early childhood education can contribute to long-term social cohesion and sustainable futures by fostering trust and belonging from the earliest years. At the same time, it will critically examine tensions within institutions and policies that may undermine these processes.

Format and Participation
The session will be organised as an interactive panel featuring short presentations (10–12 minutes each) followed by a moderated discussion to encourage dialogue across contexts. We welcome contributions from researchers, teacher educators, practitioners, policymakers, and activists from diverse geographical regions.

Language Policy
The session will be conducted primarily in English to facilitate global participation. However, we encourage multilingual engagement and welcome presenters to incorporate other languages (e.g., Hindi or regional languages in the Indian context) where appropriate, with brief translations to ensure accessibility

In urban educational landscapes marked by internal migration and socio-economic precarity, early childhood education (ECE) settings represent a foundational encounter between families and state institutions. While determinants of private school selection in India are widely discussed in terms of quality, cost, and English-medium aspiration (Härmä, 2011; Srivastava, 2013), literature rarely interrogates whether this choice reflects positive trust in private enterprise or a protective exit strategy driven by mistrust of state alternatives.
This paper investigates the central research question: Do internal migrant parents in urban Delhi choose low-fee private preschools because they trust private institutions more, or because they mistrust free state alternatives such as ICDS Anganwadis and municipal schools?
The paper adopts a conceptual and critical literature-based approach complemented by an exploratory qualitative lens in Delhi. Drawing on scholarship on parental school choice, migration and education, and institutional trust, it re-interprets established academic, non-academic and socio-economic determinants (Kumar & Choudhury, 2021; Mousumi & Kusakabe, 2019) through trust and mistrust. The framework is informed by Hirschman’s (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty theory and relational trust theory (Bryk & Schneider, 2002), focusing on how parents navigate ECE under uncertainty and documentation barriers (UNESCO, 2019). For an exploratory qualitative lens, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 internal migrant caregivers (15 mothers, 5 fathers) of children aged 3–6 years enrolled in low-fee private preschools, alongside key-informant interviews with 5 private preschool heads. Thematic analysis was applied.
Key findings reveal that conventional determinants are re-signified as trust markers. Safety is articulated as protection from stigma and discrimination, English-medium as portable cultural capital for belonging and interstate mobility, and “no documentation required” as a decisive determinant. Rigid identity and local address verification in public systems induces protective mistrust among circular migrants, whereas private preschools offer lower barriers. Kinship networks serve as filters, indicating relational trust over institutional trust (Coleman, 1988). Private choice thus functions as risk-mitigation to bypass public-sector neglect (Lareau, 2011). The study argues that building inclusive, trust-centered ECE aligned with NEP 2020 requires eliminating bureaucratic gatekeeping and cultivating relational accountability.
Keywords: institutional trust, protective mistrust, parental choice, low-fee private schools, internal migration

This paper examines language, identity, and belonging as a central route through which institutional trust is built or broken in early childhood education for migrant children. Focusing on Anganwadi centres, preschools, and early primary classrooms in India, while drawing comparative insights from migrant and refugee early childhood settings in South-East Asian and wider diaspora contexts, the paper argues that multilingual practice should be understood not merely as a pedagogic technique but as a trust infrastructure. India’s policy architecture now gives strong recognition to early childhood care and education, foundational learning, and home-language-based pedagogy through the National Education Policy 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage. Yet migrant families often encounter implementation gaps: destination-language classrooms, documentation anxieties, caste and class stigma, seasonal mobility, and weak family-school communication. The paper synthesises policy evidence and interdisciplinary research to show how home-language recognition, translanguaging, community mediation, and family funds of knowledge can create belonging without isolating children from wider linguistic repertoires. It concludes with policy and practice recommendations for language mapping, bilingual transition supports, educator preparation, ethical research methods with young children, and portable inclusion mechanisms across migration routes.
Keywords: early childhood education; migration; multilingualism; trust; belonging; Anganwadi; India; South-East Asian diaspora

Migration can make early education difficult for young children: a new language, unfamiliar routines and institutions, and families whose trust in unfamiliar systems has had no time to form. In India, Anganwadi centres and early classrooms are often where migrant children first encounter the state — an encounter repeated and interrupted with each move (Smita, 2008; Coffey et al., 2015), echoing a wider pattern in which sustained educator investment is treated internationally as the primary route to migrant children’s belonging (Neville et al., 2024).

Most thinking about trust in early childhood education assumes it is built slowly, through repeated contact with the same teacher, room, and institution — an assumption migration scholarship associates with a broader “sedentarist” bias favouring rootedness over mobility (Malkki, 1992; Cresswell, 2006). If any part of policy were positioned to unsettle this, it would be the arts, which create connection quickly and without shared history. India’s National Education Policy 2020 does place drama at the heart of Early Childhood Care and Education (Government of India, 2020), yet frames it as enrichment for a classroom assumed stable, not as a tool for a child who has just arrived. The policy still imagines a child who stays.

This paper, developed from practice-based work in drama pedagogy and teacher education, asks what trust-building means when a child does not stay. Migrant children in India often move between Anganwadi centres and classrooms several times a year, missing services at both origin and destination (UNESCO, 2019; India Migration Now, 2019). A trust model premised on duration cannot, by definition, serve a child defined by discontinuity — a structural mismatch, not a policy failure. This does not deny that durational relationships matter; portable trust is proposed as what fills the gap where duration is structurally unavailable.

The paper argues Theatre in Education can generate this trust, because it does not ask a child to be known — only to enter a role. Heathcote’s “mantle of the expert” (Heathcote & Bolton, 1995) makes this concrete: a child gains real authority within a fiction from the first minute, status assigned by the drama itself rather than earned through tenure. This resonates with theatre-based methods building trust with migrant participants where language and shared history are limited (Opfermann, 2019; Kaptani & Yuval-Davis, 2008), and with Boal’s (1979) argument that theatre restructures participation without requiring prior institutional standing. Trust here is not accumulated but re-made each session: portable, rather than durational.

The paper closes by arguing that teacher training should treat role-work, not relationship-building over time, as a primary trust-building skill — a starting point for institutions built for children who arrive and leave, not only those who stay.

Migration is defined as families move across states in search of employment, security and better living conditions. Migration may enhance household livelihoods, but often at the expense of emotional, social and educational experiences of young children. Frequent relocation, separation from familiar surroundings, cause language barriers and social exclusion which may weaken children’s sense of belonging in the formative years of their development. Using Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development, specifically the stages of Trust versus Mistrust, Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt, Initiative versus Guilt, and Industry versus Inferiority, this paper argued that belonging is not just an emotional outcome, but a developmental necessity that shapes children’s identity, confidence, resilience and future social inclusion. In India, seasonal migration, urban informal settlements and socio-economic inequalities often interrupt access to quality early childhood services. ECE practices aligned with Erikson’s developmental stages can foster psychosocial well-being by providing emotionally safe learning spaces where all children are affirmed, respected, and valued. Enhancing belonging in early childhood not only has immediate benefits for children’s learning outcomes but also helps to build long-term resilience, identity formation, social cohesion, and
equitable educational development. Therefore, this paper titled ‘Nurturing Sense of Belonging among Migrant Children through Early Childhood Education in India; Insights from Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development’ employs a theoretical and interdisciplinary review approach that combines Erikson’s psychosocial framework with ECE offers the possibility of providing a safe and welcoming environment for migrant children, where they feel safe and accepted, experience continuity and meaningful relationships that support healthy psychosocial development. The paper concludes with a recommendation to policy makers, educators and ECCE practitioners to include psychosocial support and culturally inclusive pedagogies in early childhood programmes to nurture Sense of Belonging among Migrant Children in India.
Keywords; Sense of Belonging, Migrant Children, Early Childhood Education, Erikson’s
Theory of Psychosocial Development