Beyond Socialization: A Social Emancipatory Approach for Innovative Community-Engaged Life Skills Programming in Canada

Community Ideas Factory: The Life Skills Project is an academic-community collaboration addressing a need for innovative life skills programming (LSP). Using a community-engaged and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion-based research design, an online and interactive program was created. The Life Skills Program responds to and challenges community and scholarly critiques of how LSP is typically conceptualized by arguing for a social emancipatory transformative learning approach. This approach engenders a dual focus on non-formal education , which seeks to socialize and prepare learners to participate within the status quo and popular education , which seeks to disrupt it. Through this conceptual argument, we position The Life Skills Program within the “critical turn” in the life skills literature, which reimagines programming through a transformative lens.