Critical Perspectives on Trust in Early Childhood Education: Micro-Level Experiences Between Families, Children, and Institutions

Session conveners: Anna Björnö anna.bjorno@laurea.fi,
Berenice Rivera Macias and Alina Leminen
Laurea University of Applied Sciences

Session description

This session invites contributions assessing the relationship between early childhood education and multilingual families with a critical lens. In particular, we wish to ask how participation is enabled, constrained, or selectively recognized within existing educational structures.

We are interested in examining how institutional hierarchies, racialized expectations, and monolingual norms shape whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is legitimized, and how “inclusion” comes to be defined and enacted. As a particular emphasis, we would like the contributions to address how trust is built, negotiated, and at times fractured between the different stakeholders around early childhood education and multilingual families.

The session questions the field’s reliance on normative claims such as “home languages matter” or “multilingualism is an asset.” What kinds of work do these statements actually do and what do they obscure? Rather than taking multilingual children’s participation for granted as an ethica given due to these broad principles stated above, we question What forms of knowledge and language practices remain unintelligible or undervalued, even within well-intentioned frameworks of diversity and inclusion?

We invite contributions that move beyond declarative positions to examine the material, institutional, and interactional conditions under which language diversity is supported, ignored, or stays symbolic. What infrastructures, resources, and forms of participation are required for multilingualism to become more than an aspirational principle? Inspired by participatory and co-design approaches, such as those developed in the VOIKO project, we are interested in how children and families might not only be included, but also unsettle and reconfigure dominant pedagogical and epistemic arrangements.

We welcome analyses that explore tensions between professional authority and family expertise, attend to the protective and political dimensions of mistrust, and consider how mistrust itself may function as a form of critique or resistance.

Potential formats of these sessions presentations could be diverse as long as they drive productive discussion. Researchers, practitioners, and NGO actors are invited to engage in a collective reflection on how early childhood education (and professional work within it or parental engagement) might be reimagined as spaces where trust, belonging, and multilingualism are not simply affirmed, but continuously negotiated, contested, and materially sustained.

Presentations may be delivered in English or Finnish, and contributors are
welcome to draw on other relevant languages connected to their work.

We encourage all presenters to design their sessions so they remain accessible to participants who may not share all of the languages used, for example through clear visuals, summaries, or other supportive practices. Our aim is to create a multilingual space where linguistic diversity is
treated as a shared resource and responsibility.