Positive Psychology in Higher Education

Acacia Parks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317850632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Positive psychology – the scientific study of happiness – is a rapidly burgeoning field, and in no area more so than education. More departments than ever are offering courses in positive psychology, and demand for these courses is consistently high. Graduate programs offering concentrations in positive psychology have appeared at both masters and doctoral level. Educational institutions have expressed interest in using principles of positive psychology to inform institutional structure, faculty development and pedagogy.

Positive psychology has been taught and applied in higher education for almost as long as it has existed as a field, but there is little in the way of published literature that brings all of these developments together. The chapters in this volume represent the use of positive psychology at all levels of higher education – from institutional practices and curricular development to pedagogy and the teaching of positive psychology content itself. This book provides an in-depth look at this exciting area of applied positive psychology which will be relevant to educators and administrators alike.

This book is based on a special issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology.

Towards the establishment of best practices for applying positive psychology in higher education

Acacia C. Parks

Hiram College

Since its inception just over ten years ago, positive psychology (PP) has tasked itself with the scientific study of well-being – the traits and circumstances that lead to it, its benefits, and the behaviors that can be practiced in order to promote it. In that time, we have seen significant theoretical advancements, have developed myriad techniques for increasing happiness, and have made major strides in the dissemination of both research and practice to the general public. Entire volumes have been dedicated to the use of PP in coaching (e.g. Biswas-Diener, 2010) and in therapy (e. g. Magyar-Moe, 2009; O’Hanlon & Bertolini, 2012). In January 2011, American Psychologist dedicated a special issue to the application of positive psychology to promoting resilience in the U.S. Army (Casey, 2011). Gilman, Hubener and Furlong (2009)’s edited volume, the Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools, is currently undergoing revision for a second edition, suggesting that work applying PP in K-12 is not only abundant, but ongoing.

Positive psychology has long flourished in higher education as well. Indeed, positive psychology has been taught and applied in higher education for almost as long as it has existed as a field, and yet, with few exceptions, there is little in the way of published literature that brings all of these developments together. There is, however, much to report. More departments than ever are offering courses in PP, and demand for these courses is consistently high (see Russo-Netzer & Ben-Shahar, in this volume). Graduate programs offering concentrations in positive psychology have appeared both at the masters and doctoral level. Educational institutions have expressed interest in using principles of PP to inform institutional structure, faculty development, and pedagogy. It was this observation that first motivated the special issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology on Positive Psychology in Higher Education, upon which this volume is based. The special issue was a first attempt to summarize the state of positive psychology in higher education. Below, you will find an overview of those articles, as well as the additional two pieces that are new to this volume. These contributions are divided into four sections: 1) institutional practices, 2) designing a positive psychology course, 3) integrating positive psychology into different courses, and 4) the ethics of teaching positive psychology.

Institutional practices

The first section of the book presents potential ways in which positive psychology can be implemented at the level of the institution – in its policies and procedures, and in the institutional culture of the faculty. In the opening piece, Lindsay G. Oades, Paula Robinson, Suzy Green, and Gordon B. Spence provide a rationale for implementing PP principles at different levels of higher education: in the classroom, in the social milieu on-campus, in the surrounding community, among the faculty and administration, and in student residential environments. Citing evidence that positive states lead to better academic outcomes, they provide specific examples of how these can be fostered through institution-level practices.

The next two chapters make suggestions for ways that faculty can integrate positive psychology into their own development and self-assessment. Charles J. Walker describes a set of techniques for assessing students’ real-time experiences of two positive states – positive emotion and engagement – in the classroom. Faculty can use these types of assessments to identify in-class activities and pedagogical practices that promote and inhibit students’ experiences of positive states, and in doing so may improve learning outcomes. Thomas V. McGovern provides a framework for strengths-based faculty development in which faculty can develop key strengths that are particularly useful for teaching and mentorship. Drawing from his own refashioned version of Peterson and Seligman’s taxonomy of strengths and virtues, he proposes a four-module program that helps faculty explore the potential uses of each strength for the academic, intellectual, and/or social aspects of teaching. By gaining an understanding of how each of the 24 strengths can contribute to teaching and learning, instructors learn how to most effectively mobilize their own strengths at work. Taken together, these pieces provide concrete ideas for how positive psychology can be used to effect change in academic institutions, and in institution-wide pedagogical practices.

Designing a positive psychology course

New PP instructors often have many questions regarding potential teaching methods and activities, as well as selection of readings and topics to cover. In this section, we turn to the question of how one might go about designing a positive psychology course, including issues of course structure, pedagogical methods, and course content. Pninit Russo-Netzer and Tal Ben-Shahar begin by sharing the thought process that went into designing Ben-Shahar’s now-renowned positive psychology course that, when taught by him in 2006, was the most highly enrolled class at Harvard. Using this course as a prototype, they offer practical advice for designing a PP course. Further adding to the reader’s toolbox for course design, Robert Biswas-Diener and Lindsey Patterson make an argument for the use of experiential learning in-class, through assignments practiced outside of class, and even when designing one’s syllabus. Amy Kranzler, myself, and Jane Gillham describe a PP course with a major service learning component; classroom learning about resilience is paralleled and reinforced through the opportunity to teach resilience to at-risk youth in an after-school program. Marie D. Thomas and Barbara J. McPherson offer a final methodological innovation: using a positive psychology approach to team-based learning. In their course, they divide students into ongoing groups based on their character strengths, and use that group identity to structure assignments and in-class activities.

Other papers in this section provide practical advice on the selection of topics and readings in positive psychology courses. Grant Rich provides a comprehensive overview and comparison of existing PP textbooks, including a systematic review of the topics featured in each. Eranda Jayawickreme and Marie Forgeard discuss ways to dovetail more traditional readings with non-scientific materials, including popular books and self-help, as well as sources from philosophy, literature, and film. Concluding the section, Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti offers strategies for infusing the topic of culture into PP courses, both during course design and through in-class practices.

Integrating positive psychology into existing courses

One challenge people face when trying to begin teaching positive psychology is that time, space, or resources may limit the creation of a new course. This section presents various ways in which one might bring PP into an existing curriculum, inside or outside of a psychology department. Jeana L. Magyar-Moe discusses ways to integrate PP content into other psychology courses, emphasizing psychopathology, cultural psychology, counseling, and personality (she also offers brief suggestions for other courses, including social, health, sport, and physiological psychology). Peter E. L. Marks provides a profile of a course that revolves around popularity – which includes positive psychology topics such as friendship and pro-social behavior – while still remaining clearly seated in developmental psychology. As an example of overcoming the difficulty involved in adding a new subarea to an existing curriculum, Chu Kim-Prieto and Carianne D’Oriano describe two core psychology courses in their department – research methods and research experience – that they have infused with PP content. Jaime L. Kurtz describes her cross-disciplinary course, ‘Happiness and Self-Knowledge’, which tempers the science of happiness with research on judgment and decision-making; such a course could be a psychology department elective, or an offering in an interdisciplinary program – it could be easily co-taught (in the editor’s opinion) with an economist or a philosopher. Most broadly, in a new contribution to the volume, I, along with Valerie Ross (director of the University of Pennsylvania’s freshman writing program) write about our efforts using PP in the context of a “writing in the disciplines” first-year seminar – a pre-existing institution-wide program.

The ethics of teaching positive psychology

Dianne A. Vella-Brodrick closes this volume with a thought-provoking piece on the ethics of teaching positive psychology. Positive psychology is a field where dissemination and implementation occurs rapidly, sometimes even ahead of the science. Thus, ethical considerations are important not only as an academic topic to discuss with students in class but for us, as teachers, to consider in the design of courses and curricula. Vella-Brodrick makes a compelling case for the various ways in which ethics are relevant to PP, providing concrete ways that we can make use of these ethical concepts as instructors, and also teach ethics to our students. The issues raised by Vella-Brodrick are relevant to anyone applying positive psychology in any context; however, they are especially in higher education, as the majority of those who apply PP in other settings (in therapy, for example) are students at colleges and universities at some point.

Moving forward: Best practices in applying positive psychology in higher education

Taken together, these articles provide a snapshot of the state of positive psychology in higher education. The number of contributions in the special issue (selected from many more proposals), as well as the diversity and breadth of the articles, provides evidence that PP is taking root in many aspects of higher education. This volume provides a variety of ideas for the teaching of PP, and for the application of PP at institutions of higher education. However, to date, little or no data exists on the effectiveness of these practices, or on the ways in which effectiveness can be maximized. It is my hope that in the coming years, a volume like this one will be able to describe an evidence-based application of positive psychology in higher education, addressing questions such as: does including positive psychology in a college curriculum increase the well-being of students, and if so, does that increase lead to better objective outcomes like GPA and persistence? Does positive psychology-oriented institutional policy and faculty development have an impact on students’ well-being and academic outcomes? Does the inclusion of positive psychology in a psychology department’s curriculum help departments meet their educational objectives in ways that other psychology courses cannot?

To illustrate, I will give some examples of important research questions related to PP course design. There are many unanswered questions about the pedagogical utility of various approaches to teaching positive psychology. For example, there is great variation between PP sylabi in the types of sources used (see Rich, in this volume; Jayawickreme & Forgeard, in this volume), and one particularly distinctive feature of positive psychology is the widespread use of popular psychology books such as Authentic Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis, Positivity, The How of Happiness, Thanks!, Curious?, and Flourish. Perhaps due to the inclusion of self-help under the umbrella of positive psychology (see Parks, Schueller, & Tasimi, 2013), mainstream titles appear in PP courses more so than in other areas of psychology. It is not yet been established whether the use of these books – sometimes in lieu of reading original research – bolsters pedagogy (due to their readability) or hurts it (due to their simplification for lay audiences). It is possible that in some contexts – say, a first-year seminar or freshman orientation (see Parks & Ross, in this volume) – accessibility trumps complexity, but in others – say, an advanced seminar (e.g. Kim-Prieto & D’Oriano, in this volume; Kurtz, in this volume) – it may be better to delve into research articles. Give that there is great variation from syllabus to syllabus in the breadth and depth of sources used (see Rich, in this volume; Jayawickreme & Forgeard, in this volume), an empirical examination of the impact of such variation would be worthwhile.

Many positive psychology courses are also distinctive in their emphasis on experiential learning. While previous research suggests that experiential learning is useful in any course (Clements, 1995; Poorman, 2002), positive psychology is arguably a particularly appropriate venue for hands-on activities (see Biswas-Diener & Patterson, in this volume; Kranzler, Parks & Gillham, in this volume), and many such activities exist, drawn both from research (Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, 2005; Emmons & McCullough, 2003) and from teaching-related resources (e.g. see Rich, in this volume for a list of textbooks that include activities; see also Froh & Parks, 2012). Seligman et al. (2005) argue, based on their experiences teaching PP to undergraduates, that these types of activities are not only pedagogically helpful, but life changing for students. In other words, experiential learning, in the case of positive psychology, has the potential to go beyond teaching material to actually improving the everyday well-being of students. Empirical evidence of this claim – say, by making a comparison between the well-being impact of an experiential learning activity in developmental psychology and a similar activity in positive psychology – would build a powerful case for the benefits of offering PP to undergraduates.

In short, there are many opportunities to gather evidence of the benefits of positive psychology when applied in higher education, and when taught in the classroom; this book, I hope, is only the beginning of what will become an ongoing discussion about positive psychology pedagogy, course design, curricular concerns, cutting-edge teaching methods, in-class activities, faculty development, impact on student outcomes, and assessment. These conversations can happen in many contexts – on the FRIENDS-OF-PP list-serv; in articles in peer-reviewed outlets such as the Journal of Positive Psychology and Teaching of Psychology; in future edited volumes; and at conferences such as the Society for Teaching of Psychology’s institutes at APA and SPS, and the Positive Psychology World Congress. It is only by accruing this evidence base that positive psychology can become its best, and in the process, break into common practice at academic institutions around the globe.

References

Biswas-Diener, R. (2010). Practicing positive psychology coaching: Assessment and strategies for success. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Casey, Jr., G. W. (2011). Comprehensive soldier fitness: A vision for psychological resilience in the U.S. Army. American Psychologist, 66, 1–3.

Clements, A. D. (1995). Experiential-learning activities in undergraduate developmental psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 22, 115–118.

Emmons, R. A. (2007). Thanks! How the new science of gratitude can make you happier. New York, NY: Houghton-Mifflin.

Emmons, R.A. & McCullough, M.E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental longitudinal investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377–389.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2009). Positivity. New York, NY: Crown Publisher Group.

Froh, J.J. & Parks, A.C. (2012). Activities for teaching positive psychology: A guide for instructors. Washington, DC: APA Books.

Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Curious? Discover the missing ingredient to a fulfilling life. New York, NY: William Morrow.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

Magyar-Moe, J. L. (2009). Therapist’s guide to positive psychological interventions. New York, NY: Academic Press.

O’Hanlon, B., & Bertolini, B. (2012). The therapist’s notebook on positive psychology: Activities, exercises, and Handouts. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group.

Parks, A.C., Schueller, S.M., & Tasimi, A. (2013). Increasing happiness in the general population: Empirically supported self-help. To appear in S. David, I. Boniwell, & A.C. Ayers (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poorman, B. E. (2002). Biography and role-playing: Fostering empathy in abnormal psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 29, 32–36.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York, NY: Free Press.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. New York, NY: Simon ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Towards the establishment of best practices for applying positive psychology in higher education
• 2. Towards a positive university
• 3. Classroom assessment techniques for promoting more positive experiences in teaching and learning
• 4. Virtues and character strengths for sustainable faculty development
• 5. Incorporating positive psychology content and applications into various psychology course
• 6. Integrating research training and the teaching of positive psychology
• 7. Adolescent popularity: A positive psychology course with a developmental foundation
• 8. Happiness and self-knowledge: A positive psychology and judgement and decision-making hybrid course
• 9. ‘Learning from success’: A close look at a popular positive psychology course
• 10. An experiential approach to teaching positive psychology to undergraduates
• 11. Illustrating positive psychology concepts through service learning: Penn teaches resilience
• 12. Teaching positive psychology using team-based learning
• 13. Teaching tools for positive psychology: A comparison of available textbooks
• 14. Insight or data: Using non-scientific sources to teach positive psychology
• 15. Broadening perspectives: Strategies to infuse multiculturalism into a positive psychology course
• 16. Writing critically about personal growth: A ‘writing in the disciplines’ course on happiness
• 17. The moral of the story: The importance of applying an ethics lens to the teaching of positive psychology
• Index