Students' collaborative meaning-making in life skills education: Integrating personal experiences with theoretical knowledge

Reflecting an international policy trend, several countries have incorporated life skills education (LSE) into their school curricula. While education has always transcended mere subject mastery, embedding life skills prompts schools to engage more closely with students' personal lives and experiences. The implications, and the opportunities and challenges that follow, remain relatively underexplored. Adopting a sociocultural and dialogic approach, this study examines students' collaborative meaning-making processes where their personal experiences intersect with more conventional theoretical knowledge resources. The empirical context is an LSE project where lower secondary school students engaged with the topic ‘youth, identity and belonging’. Microanalyses of student interaction reveal that personal experiences became important mediational means in the sense of enabling students to collectively explore and invoke a variety of perspectives, while simultaneously fostering engagement and peer support. Although theoretical resources introduced students to ‘authorised’ conceptualisations, personal experiences and theoretical knowledge remained disjointed rather than integrated. The findings underscore the significance of building on students' personal experiences within LSE, while also revealing challenges in integrating personal experiences with theoretical knowledge—an integral component for students' development of conceptual understanding. Thus, this study contributes insights that support LSE facilitation, or other educational settings where personal experiences take centre stage. • Life skills education enabled students to invoke essential conceptual frameworks. • The students' personal experiences held advanced ideas and assumptions. • Sharing personal experiences increased students' ownership in the learning process. • Internet sources offered theory access, yet less shared meaning-making. • Personal experiences and theoretical knowledge remained disjointed, not integrated.