Educational Inclusion in Uruguay: Creating Collaborative Narratives with Migrant Children During the Pandemic

This chapter describes a collaboration between teachers and students at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, and young participants from nearby minority communities. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic in a school working with a high percentage of immigrant children, the author details the development of an intergenerational and intercultural multi-grade classroom that provided an opportunity for critical reflection and growth for all participants (teachers, researchers, university students, community leaders, and children). The program is based on models such as La Clase Mágica and the Fifth Dimension and promotes the development of children’s imagination, integrating narrative, creative, collaborative processes and the use of different technological artifacts in community and school contexts. In this chapter we reflect on the experience of working in a pandemic and show how the system of activities we built offered an opportunity for critical reflection and growth for all the people involved. We seek to generate processes of educational inclusion, understood as the guarantee of access, quality permanence, belonging, and full participation of boys and girls, regardless of their personal, ethnic-racial, social, economic, and cultural characteristics, through the design and implementation of a collaborative and narrative proposal.