The Emergence of Skills in Moroccan Higher Education: A Qualitative Study on Stakeholders’ Attitudes, Views and Expectation

AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021) Andalas International Journal of Socio-Humanities ISSN: 2715-601X (Online) Available at: http://aijosh.lppm.unand.ac.id/index.php/aijosh/index DOI: https://doi.org/10.25077/aijosh.v3i2.24 Article The Emergence of Skills in Moroccan Higher Education A Qualitative Study on Stakeholders’ Attitudes, Views and Expectation Zineb Birrou*, Aziz Kich, & Mohamed Larouz University Moulay Ismail Meknes, Morocco Article Information Abstract Received : October 18, 2021 This paper provides an exploration of a range of perspectives and attitudes towards the emergence of Life Skills in the Moroccan Higher Education curricula. We briefly introduce the national context of the Bachelor’s Degree Reform (BDR) of 2019 introducing these skills as well as the international proactive measures to create a new space for well-being policies and assessments. The focus of the present article is to explore the students and professors’ views on officially integrating such innovative modules within the academic program for the first time. In order to obtain relevant data, a qualitative approach was adopted. The findings suggest that the majority of interviewed university professors were supportive of the aforementioned reform (BDR). The reluctant minority voiced out their concerns over the lack of clarity regarding the teaching and evaluation methodologies for skills in which there has been no proper teacher training yet. On the other hand, the students’ narratives after a six- week experimental Life Skills-based course suggest that the intervention was very successful, and seems to enhance emotional, and psychological health, therefore cultivating their overall well-being and resilience. In other words, their attitudes were unanimously positive and their perceived impact of the course deeply transformational. Revised : December 20, 2021 Accepted : January 11, 2021 Published : January 20, 2022 Keywords Bachelor reform; life skill education; resilience; soft skills; well-being *Correspondence INTRODUCTION The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile (Kennedy, 1968, cited in Gable & Haidt, 2005). For a very long time, economic prosperity was viewed as the primary indicator of a country’s welfare and development, in addition to being the ultimate goal to be pursued (Shrotryia & Singh, 2020). In his presidential campaign speech of 1968, Robert Kennedy eloquently expressed the shortcomings of the Gross National Product (GDP). Granted that the latter is a very effective measure of economic growth, it nonetheless falls short in adequately providing information on key aspects such as well-being and quality of life, or what Robert Kennedy describes as “everything that makes life worthwhile” (Gable & Haidt, 2005; Shrotryia & Singh, 2020). 129 AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 2 (2021) In their book ‘The eudaimonic turn: Well-being in literary studies’, Pawelski & Moores (2012) discuss the new trajectories policy makers have taken in the past two decades in order to fill in the observed gap. For instance, we can mention the creation of “the commission on measurement of economic performance and social progress” in 2008 by former French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Led by economists, this commission issued a set of recommendations such as tracking and measuring quality of live aspects left out of the GDP, including subjective well-being and capabilities (Afsa et al., 2008). Two years later, the United Kingdom decided to start measuring and considering national well-being in their policies. In fact, in 2010, their prime minister at the time, Cameron as cited in (Pawelski & Moores, 2012) stated the following: “we will start measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life”. The initiatives and actions to begin encompassing well-being have not been limited to western societies. Indeed, the realization that economic activity growth is insufficient and incomplete (Van Den Bergh, 2009) is also present in the developing world. For example, in countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador where their constitutions have started including notions of well-being- ‘living well’- rooted in indigenous culture (Gerlach, 2017; Bedriñana, Umaña & Martín, 2020). By and large, numerous international organizations such as OECD and many governments have updated their assessments, and begun introducing wellbeing and life satisfaction in their agenda (OECD, 2011; Cavalletti & Corsi, 2018; Fleischer, Frieling & Exton, 2020). In the Moroccan context, the publication of the New Model of Development in 2019 included the notion of the citizens’ well-being, and emphasized the importance of investing in the immaterial human resource, developing and unleashing its full potential (Institut Royal des Etudes Stratégiques, 2019). In order to do so, actions in the education sector have been taken including the new policy integrating Soft Skills in the university curricula through the BDR of 2019 (El Bakkali, 2020). These new courses are structured as follow: • • • • Year 1= Two modules of Study Skills; Year 2= Two modules of Life Skills; Year 3= Two modules of Civic Skills; and Year 4= Two modules of Professional Skills. Among the eight new modules Moroccan universities are supposed to transversally include in their undergraduate curricula, the Life Skills component seems to be the one straightforwardly addressing well-being and the concept of “living well”. Soft Skills The term ‘Soft Skills’ has gained a significant amount of traction in the past few years, and has become increasingly ‘trendy’ within professional and academic circles. Originally, it seems that the term was first coined by the US army in the early 1970s (Touloumakos, 2020), referring to the array of essential skills unrelated to machinery, yet considered prerequisites for the successful completion of the job. In order to draw the distinction between Hard and Soft Skills in the military context, one could think of using a gun as the Hard Skill, while effectively coordinating with the team, leading a unit, motivating oneself and others as the Soft Skills (Touloumakos, 2020). Hard and Soft Skills are complementary, and both equally needed; it is indeed a meaningless endeavo (...truncated)