The traveling notebook as a bridge between families and school in student education

Abstract

This article explores the experience of the traveling notebook as a situated pedagogical strategy, serving as a tool to strengthen the school-family-territory connection in a rural educational institution in the municipality of Caldono (Cauca), Colombia. From a critical and decolonial perspective, the essay investigates the potential of family narratives as educational tools to foster processes of cultural identity, community participation, and epistemic justice in contexts with historical trajectories of educational inequality and social exclusion. Structurally, the work describes a pedagogical experience developed over an academic semester, in which written accounts were compiled, a collective reading was conducted, and the interpretive process of the family narratives written by the students' mothers and fathers was advanced. The results show that the strategy fostered communication between teachers and parents and improved reading and writing skills in both children and parents. Furthermore, it led to improvements in student self-esteem, increased family involvement in school, and a redefinition of pedagogical relationships toward shared educational responsibility. It is concluded that the traveling notebook is a pedagogical practice based on the ecology of knowledge that validates rural knowledge, strengthens community social fabric, and reinforces the role of the rural teacher as an intercultural mediator and social transformer.