Fe y Alegria Colombia (a name which could be translated as Faith and Joy) is a popular education movement that works with and for the poor population in 18 cities in Colombia, striving to provide them with quality education (formal and non-formal). As part of this effort, this movement published (between 2003 and 2006) a series of teacher guides aimed at facilitating school-room processes that will help students develop the set of 10 life skills proposed by WHO (1993)  as necessary to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.

The program started in Fe y Alegria in 1996, and it has been introduced in the movement’s schools’ (totaling 64 and covering 40,000 students ages 10 to 15) curriculum along these years in several ways. One of them was taking specific time within the regular school timetable and having any teacher – previously trained — facilitating the workshop-like sessions with students. Another was hiring teachers with a specific psycho-pedagogical profile and turning the sessions into regular courses with weekly hours assigned in the school calendar. The model and materials of the Life Skills Program of Fe y Alegria is now used nationwide by numerous official and private schools, and also in schools and non-formal education groups in other countries, such as Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua and Chile.

The Life Skills series was not the only material produced in area of work. The Colombian educational system also promoted the introduction of citizenship education, and general work competencies, which lead to the development of other publications, although they also contained several of the Life Skills defined by WHO. The burden posed by this situation to the teachers led the movement to organize the teaching of the three types of competencies (psychosocial, citizen, and work) in one curricular net, comprising studies from kindergarten to 11th grade. This has led to a better understanding of the teaching/training of competencies at their significance at the individual, collective, societal, and global levels.
--Amanda Bravo, amybravo@hotmail.com