PART 2: Activities to Promote Inclusivity

Ten core life skills laid down by the World Health Organization (WHO) are considered crucial for the 21^st century:

Self-awareness: Includes recognition of self, our character, our strengths and weaknesses, desires and dislikes. Creating self-awareness can help adolescents recognize when they are under stress or feel pressured. Self-awareness is often a prerequisite to effective communication and interpersonal relations, as well as for developing empathy with others.

Empathy: Empathy is the ability to imagine what life is like for another person. Without empathy, the communication that adolescents have with others will not amount to a two-way process. Empathy can help adolescents accept others who may be very different from them. This can improve their social interaction in classroom settings but also later in life, in situations of ethnic or cultural diversity.

Critical thinking: An ability to analyse information and experiences in an objective manner. Critical thinking can contribute by helping the adolescent to recognize and assess the factors that influence attitudes and behaviour, such as values, peer pressure and the media.

Creative thinking: A novel way of seeing or doing things that is characteristic of four components – fluency (generating new ideas), flexibility (shifting perspective easily), originality (conceiving of something new), and elaboration (building on other ideas).

Decision making: A skill that can help an adolescent deal constructively with decisions about their lives. Young adults can learn to assess the different options available to them and consider what effects these different decisions are likely to have.

Problem solving: Helps in empowering the adolescent to look at a problem objectively vis-à-vis the different options for solutions and would help them come to a solution after weighing the pros and cons of the different options available.

Interpersonal relationship skills: Help adolescents relate in positive ways with people they interact with in their everyday lives. This may entail being able to make and keep friendly relationships, of great importance to our mental and social well-being; maintaining good relations with family members and being able to end relationships constructively.

Effective communication: Means helping the adolescents express themselves, both verbally and non-verbally, in ways that are appropriate to cultures and situations. This means being able to express opinions, desires, needs and fears and includes the ability of being able to ask for advice and help in a time of need.

Coping with stress: As a life skill, this means recognizing the sources of stress in their lives, recognizing how this affects them, and acting in ways that help them control their levels of stress; learning positive coping styles and replacing passive with active coping mechanisms - this may include changing their environment or lifestyle, and learning how to relax.

Coping with emotions: Includes recognizing emotions within themselves and others, being aware of how emotions influence behaviour, and being able to respond to emotions appropriately. An important aspect of this skill is learning to manage intense emotions like anger or sadness that can have negative effects on our health if we do not respond appropriately.

Based on recent international proposals focusing on children and adolescents and the results of an InCrea+ international survey report, we will refer to these skills as grouped into 3 main categories (Trilling & Fadel, 2009):

1.Learning skills (Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, Problem solving)

2.Literacy Skills (Information Literacy, Media Literacy, Technology Literacy)

3.Life Skills (Empathy, Flexibility and Adaptability, Leadership, Initiative and Self-Direction, Social and Cross-Cultural Interaction).

In developing the activities for the curriculum, we expect to cover these three sets of skills.