Abstract:

The present study aimed to know the perception of university students about the teaching of life skills in five different degree programs. Under the premise that the essential meaning of education is not only for school, but also for life.

Therefore, nowadays, universities should be constituted as spaces for training with a higher level, seeking to promote the personal and intellectual growth of students in accordance with the challenges of globalization in our society. Life skills are intended to promote the health and well-being of the person through the training of psychosocial skills. In formal education contexts, the teaching of life skills has been carried out since 1993. Melero (2010) points out that the life skills approach has proved useful in the following cases:
a) Development of personal autonomy and social inclusion;
b) Promotion of prosocial behavior;
c) Promotion of equality between men and women;
d) Affective-sexual education;
e) Negotiated settlement of conflicts of coexistence;
f) Drug abuse; and
g) Coping violence situations.

According to previous statements, the university -research scenario- incorporated in its Institutional Development Plan 2010-2020 the University Social Responsibility (USR) as its integrating program containing 15 priority actions, one of them being the Update of the Educational and Academic Model, which resulted in the implementation of the new Educational Model for Integral Training for its students. Within this educational model there are subjects such as USR that promote life skills (PDI, 2010).

Under this perspective, a qualitative research was conducted with an ethnographic design (Patton, 2012). Five group interviews were conducted with a total of 25 undergraduate students in the areas of biological, exact, health, social and architectural sciences. The interviews lasted approximately 40 to 60 minutes. An interview script was elaborated in which they inquired about the knowledge of the life skills and the teaching that they had of them in the different subjects that they had studied and especially in the USR subject. The outcomes indicate that there is a difference between undergraduates areas in how they teach life skills, standing out the exact sciences students who point out that there is a consistency between what they learn and what they apply in relation to university social responsibility.

Keywords:

Life skills, higher education, university social responsibility, ethnography.