This module, also known as “life planning education” or LPE intends to bring out the positive behavioral change among young adults. It promotes the idea that young adults can very well determine what life they are to live based upon their interests, dreams, talents, skills and aspirations through appropriate interventions like goal setting, life-maps and empowerment. It is thus a journey to self-determination and fulfillment.
Interestingly, the program is also interactive and experiential. Guided by four basic questions about the self, who am I? Where am I now? Where am I going? and how do I get there? it attempts to identify and discover one’s capabilities and potentials. Likewise, it guides one to assess, evaluate and reflect on one’s current state in preparation to a more defined direction in the future. The LPE thus, is a way of making young adults realize the necessity of life plans, goals and directions appropriate for a worthwhile human life.
On one hand, it is difficult to provide a definition that is fitting to uncover the richness of the LPE program. A humble description though may probably lead one into understanding its many potentials: The LPE is a module-based development program designed to facilitate the process of self-discovery and life planning among young adults. It is a three-day workshop directed to assisting the young adults in making sound decisions, choices and discoveries of potentials necessary for growth and maturity towards their own empowerment.
There are also other descriptions that may be appropriate:
it is an examination of one’s basic relationship with one’s self, with others, with one’s family, with one’s community and with one’s life-situation
it is an experience of adolescent’s life within an atmosphere of a community
it is a challenge to capability building and community organizing
it is a three-day process of growth that leads to a deeper personal commitment to one’s self, family, group, school or association
a workshop that brings about change in one’s values
It is hoped that at the end of the LPE, young adults are expected to display:
greater self-awareness that leads to greater capabilities for self-direction
greater sensitivity to others that lead to greater interpersonal relationship
deeper commitment to one’s goals and plans
capability to support and strengthen others who have not yet experience the LPE
Basically, the LPE tries to bring about change in the young adults through certain processes deemed appropriate for achieving the expected goals. It also attempts to draw out one’s potentials through the same process. The LPE uses the experiential and interactive process of self-discovery through the following strategies:
personal reflection
small group and big group sharing
group dynamics
life mapping
ice breakers
The Dynamics of LPE
The process of self-discovery and life planning starts from the familiar road of knowing the self. It commences from there. The initial condition, so it seems, for growth and empowerment is grounded upon knowledge of the self.
Using the four (4) basic questions mentioned at the outset and the self as the familiar road to growth and empowerment, the LPE dynamics is set in motion in three (3) stages. Each stage is an opportunity to bring about change in an individual, hopeful that in the end, self-discovery maybe achieved.
Stage 1: Self Awareness: The Journey Inward
The journey inward invites young adults to take the unfamiliar road of knowing the self through several sessions on self-awareness and self-disclosure. It facilitates this process through four (4) basic sessions relevant to achieve the level of self-awareness expected of young adults. The following descriptions may help provide a clearer picture of the sessions mentioned.
Session 1: Self, Awareness and Prospects
This session invites young adults to realize their life prospects by becoming aware of who they are, of what they want in their lives and who they want to become in the future.
Session 2: Identity, Personality and Community
This session focuses more on facilitating the process of discovery about the inter-relatedness between young adults and their community through an emphasis on the social identity of young adults. Likewise, it demonstrates the continuing struggle between the personal identities of young adults and their social identities.
Session 3: Potential, Actuality and Expression
Session 3 focuses more on the process of getting in touch with one’s strengths and weaknesses in order to bring about one’s hidden abilities, skills or talents that may possibly assist in the further discovery of the self.
Session 4: Role, Relationship and Communion
Session 4 invites young adults to examine the different roles that they have and they are encouraged to explore the relationships that go with the roles. Here, it becomes manifest that greater roles may largely influence greater relationships.
Stage 2: Life Prospects: The Journey Outward
The Journey Outward capitalizes on the articulations of interests, dreams, values and plans of young adults based on the sessions in Stage 1. This stage invites young adults to make their own life plans through suitably realistic goals that they can possibly achieve in due time. Also, it attempts to assist them in mapping their lives as they go through with the challenges and demands of the adolescent life. The Journey Outward involves two (2) elementary sessions that may facilitate the process of generating conditions pertinent to their life prospects.
Session 5: Communication, Understanding and Meaning
Session 5 attempts to lay down basic principles of communication and understanding so that decisions, goals and prospects may be properly articulated and understood.
Session 6: Choice, Decision and Goal
This session facilitates the process of realizing the significance of setting goals as a relevant tool towards achieving the envisioned self of young adults.
Stage 3: Identity and Community: The Communal Journey
The Communal Journey is the culminating stage of the entire module. It attempts to inculcate into young adults the idea that their lives are actually in communion with their community. It seeks to provide young adults basic principles within which they can actually construct principles of order and harmony as part of their collective task to build their own community. It uses the following sessions to facilitate this process.
Session 7: Identity and Collectivity
Session 7 emphasizes the social dimension of personal well-being and how this well being is closely tied up with the collective vision of a given community. It attempts to ground personal identities to the collective vision of the community in order to bring about change.
Session 8: Collectivity and Community
Session 8 provokes young adults to provide a suitably realistic picture of the community they want to create in the future. Given the scarcity of resources and how decisions are influenced and even limited by these resources, the session encourages young adults to work as one in order to overcome such limitations.
The LPE dynamics applies not only to these stages. It also applies to each component session.
Each session of the LPE have four (4) facets:
Orientation Processing
Integrating Activities Synthesis and Integration
In general, the session includes:
Preparatory activity with the participants working individually or in groups
Guided reflection
Integrating activities
Group dynamics
A short talk to deepen insights and initial discoveries
A synthesis and integration
