Problems with and possibilities for girls’ life skills: From individual skills to social relations

• In Event: Examining the rise of “life skills” education programming for adolescents in developing country contexts

Proposal

Life skills - and its cousins – social skills or non-cognitive skills, have become a major focus in educational programs and research because some of these skills have been shown to improve the linkage between education and future work and life outcomes. Life skills have been a mantra in girls’ education programming and research, where they are regarded as ensuring better educational outcomes for the girl herself and her future children, as well as ensuring the health and wellbeing of them. While recognizing the possibilities that life skills affords – especially as they mean to be able to live life well with others (now and in the future), the renewed emphasis on these “skills” and how they have been framed by donors, in the SDGs, and in school curricula, have many problems. This paper draws on two studies of a girls’ life skills program to make arguments for a reconceptualization of life skills so they can attend to the many inequalities that girls face in different social contexts.

The research that undergirds this theoretical critique of life skills includes a three-year longitudinal study of a life skills program implemented with girls in rural India during their transition to secondary school. The paper also draws on a tracer study of girls who had completed the life skills program, and their secondary education, to understand how and in what ways it affected their lives. The three-year longitudinal study followed 54 girls from six villages in northern India, using qualitative interviews with the girls and their parents/guardians. We also interviewed their mentors who taught the life skills and their secondary school teachers. The qualitative tracer study included life history interviews of 48 girls from two northern states of India who had completed secondary school with the support of the program. The participants included girls who were married and not married; those who were working and not working; and those who attended further education and some who did not.

Our findings suggest that specific life skills, such as self-confidence, managing emotions or making decisions, may have small influences on how girls act in their daily lives in relation to schooling, but other school related factors, such as having a good teacher and learning well, are more consequential on whether girls continue their schooling. In addition, these life skills do not necessarily prepare them to overcome the institutional barriers, including having insufficient English and not understanding the language of bureaucracies, when pursuing higher education or work. Rather, having other adults provide mentoring and introducing the girls to alternative imaginations of how they can pursue a different future influenced girls’ trajectories. Based on these data, we offer an alternative framing of life skills that focuses less on individual “traits” or characteristics that can be learned, such as perseverance, and more on how these “skills” are embedded in social relations in their communities, institutions and the larger society.

Author

• Joan DeJaeghere, University of Minnesota