Building social skills through literacy development

Building active citizenship through the development of literacy skills

The education plays an important role to form the man of the future. Thus, it is crucial to adopt and implement efficient procedures to deliver quality education services that will enable citizens to solve different problems that affect their community. Considering this premise, we designed this work with the pretension of developing active citizenship through the development of literacy skills in Higher Education. Such citizenship will be evidenced by personal and social development shown by students through their writing pieces. We have the pretension to explain how the development of literacy skills, specially the development of writing skills, can improve the development of social skills leading to construction of an active citizenship amongst youth students. It is important to say that this work, based in socio-constructivism perspective, will be conducted at Faculty of Agrarian Sciences of Zambeze University, in Angonia District. 
We aim to reach following objectives:
-develop active citizenship through the development of literacy skills in Higher Education;
-propose didactic strategies to develop active citizenship through the development of literacy skills in Higher Education.
This research is characterize by being experimental as we have the pretension to implement procedures in order to measure their impact- procedures to develop social skills leading to active citizenship through the development of literacy skills. 
This work will involve 100 Higher Education students. In order to collect the data, we will use authentic texts produced by our targeted students. In addition we will use questionnaires in order to collect data that will help us to get students’ evaluation regarding to the program. 
In order to measure the impact of our work, we will take in consideration the following indicators:
• Students use writing skills to show their understanding about different topics of global citizenship;
• Students use writing skills to propose solutions to different social problems (gender equity, climate changes, social justice);
• Students use writing skills to plan citizenship actions.

The activities carried by our students evidenced the development of following social skills leading to social and personal development:  
i. Values. The students made a retrospective of the values that lead social function.
ii. Perceptions.  The students deepened their understanding about the functioning of the society. They also displayed their knowledge about social responsibility and development issues;
iii. Solidarity and initiative. The students show solidarity relatively to people affected by different social problems. Additionally, their propose solution to these problems;
iv. Cooperation. The students developed cooperative skills over the presentation of their work to the other classmates. In this context, they work together with the purpose to reach solutions to problems already identified;
v. Personal leadership. The argumentation that the students conducted led them to gain leadership capacity over themselves in order to perform with efficiency social roles. 

These outcomes reflect to the first stage of our work. We still have to design intervention plans and implement them in our selected community.

Our work is innovative as we strive to develop social skills to build active citizenship through the development of literacy skills. Thus, apart of developing communicative skills, we also implement strategies that will contribute to personal and social development of students so that they will able to propose solutions to most challenging problems in their community. 

In other words, we can say that we will use the development of literacy skills to build global citizenship by training citizens able to build peace and well-being in their community and globally.

We will use the technology in the second stage of our work. In this stage we have the pretension of developing an interactive platform where the students will post their work, ask for help and publicize their intervention plans for various challenges.  In the platform we will also upload audio and video lessons. 

Technology use will help us to develop collaborative learning engage more effectively our students in learning activities either in class or out of class. It will also help us to to disseminate information regarding to our activities to our target community, partner entity and all interested people. 

The conduction of this program is inserted in achievement of the following objectives: 

-development of active citizenship through the development of literacy skills in Higher Education;

-proposal of didactic strategies to develop active citizenship through the development of literacy skills in Higher Education;

-development of citizenship intervention plans with the purpose of building peace and well-being.

With the activities that we have been conducting and to be implemented we aim to build many intervention plans that will help many unprivileged people: unprivileged women and children, disabled students and discriminated people due to their gender, sex, ethnic origin, etc. 

It is also important to say that our intervention plans are not restricted to the local that we selected to conduct our work. Moreover, our interactive platform will be available for everyone. So, whenever necessary, any entity can implement our proposals. Our ultimate goal is to use education to assure social inclusion, peace and social and economic deveploment.

To reach our beneficiaries will use two procedures: interactive platform and students volunteering/activism. In the platform will post our intervention plans and activities that we will be conducting. Selected students will implement their proposed activities in their community. In collaboration with local and religious leaders, partner entities and other team members in order to delivery our services/activities to all of our intended beneficiaries. 

In order to retain our beneficiaries we will involve them in design of our activities so that we will address activities that they are really interested in or they think that are crucial.

In this stage we are serving 154 undergraduate students. These students are attending the first year of Food engineering (86) and Agriculture and Livestock engineering (68).

They are gaining social skills whilst developing literacy skills. The acquisition of these skills is evidenced by the texts that the students have been producing. Now they are aware of main challenges in their community and are able to propose solutions to them. Moreover, they are showing readiness to implement these proposal in order to help the community to build peace and well-being. 

We expect to serve 3000 youth and children. Our students will conduct diverse activities to serve these population, mainly: production of teaching material to disabled children, work with local and religious leaders in order to break social and religious barriers that impede people to access quality education and health services, work with local and religious leaders in order to assure the education of girls. 

We believe that will achieve our outcomes as our students already show social skills to conduct successfully these activities. In addition, many of them have presented robust intervention plans.

We have an experienced team in many teaching settings, from primary to higher education. We have experience in implementing educative and social projects in many parts of our country.

Half of our team work at Agrarian Sciences Faculty where have been conducting some social activities in partnership with other organizations. So we believe that these partners will be helpful to reach more beneficiaries and to support us in other ways to effectuate our activities. 

It is also important to say that we have been working in our targeted community in other social projects. 

Our project director has a large teaching experience in primary, secondary and higher education. In addition, He has a large experience in teaching material production, mainly for disabled children. Two of four member of the team are trained teacher and work in higher education. The team also include a philosopher who will help us to understand social functioning of the community so that we can deliver effectively our solution. 

As we will be receiving new students each year, we think that it will be possible to expand intervention rays and beneficiaries. These students will plan more intervention and will target new people. Even working in the same plans, they will target more people.

The thing that captured our attention is the fact that our work is inserted in one of the challenges that Solve has defined for this contest. Thus, we find too important to apply to this grant. More than the grant, we are also interested in getting the comments from solve community so that we can improve our solution, contribute to education quality, peace and well-being either locally or globally.

We are applying to Solve because we need to make progress to our work- teaching activity. We need this help in order to implement the second stage of our work: implementation stage.

One of the most barriers that can impede effective implementation of our activities is the diffusion of the information related to our program due to the fact that we aim to work in a rural community. In this scope, Solve community members can help us to get ideas  that may facilitate our intervention. In the other side, Solve can help us to develop interactive platform so that information related to our intervention may be available for everyone, everywhere and at anytime. Using technology we can implement easily our activities to help our community.