INTERCULTURAL SOCIAL LABORATORY: A COMMITMENT TO INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

This academic essay, The Intercultural Social Laboratory as an Innovative Pedagogical Strategy to Promote Inclusive Education in Colombian Schools, emerges as a response to historical violence and migration processes that have diversified classrooms, seeking to transform the school environment into a space for dialogue, knowledge-sharing, and mutual respect. Through an experimental and experiential approach, it aims to dismantle racism and discrimination by recognizing Afro-descendant and Indigenous ethnic identities. The text grounds this initiative in national regulations and theories of critical interculturality, proposing a flexible curriculum that integrates ancestral knowledge with teaching practice. Ultimately, the laboratory functions as a space for cultural resistance and peacebuilding where diversity is valued as a cross-cutting theme of learning. Discussing interculturality in school is one of the social phenomena that shape daily life and affect the school climate. This is demonstrated by migration rates to large cities, which make students feel alienated from new realities, social issues, a lack of opportunities, and a decontextualized education that absorbs and blurs their identity without allowing them to be who they are.   That is why a proposal is put forward capable of transforming the school into an intercultural setting.