Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being
Item
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Title
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Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:dc7fb850eb86:11593
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identifier
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12102
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Creator
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Belli, Jill,
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Contributor
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Carrie Hintz
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Rhetoric | Pedagogy | American studies | Educational psychology | happiness | positive psychology | utopia | well-being
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Abstract
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Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being introduces humanities scholars to the rapidly expanding discipline of positive psychology, and argues that literary scholars, cultural theorists, rhetoricians, and educators must learn about and play a role in shaping the important political and social consequences of positive psychology's research on subjective well-being. The project first explores key rhetorical sites of the self-help genre and positive psychology discipline, and parses their pedagogy, potentiality, promises, and problems. While these movements claim to benefit not only individuals but also society, they are based on a number of unacknowledged---and often overlapping---values that suggest otherwise: they are individualistic, instrumentalized, decontextualized, non-dialogic, non-reflexive, politically conservative, and remedial. Therefore, self-help and positive psychology's versions of happiness, well-being, and flourishing preserve and serve the status quo.;After highlighting these problems, Pedagogies of Happiness explores how research into subjective well-being is used to effect crucial policy decisions that affect teaching as well as student learning conditions. The second half of the project presents current efforts to create educational curricula that teach and institutionalize well-being and complicates the assumptions, values, and goals behind so-called "positive education." The final chapter synthesizes the project's various critiques by tracing how self-help and positive psychology rhetoric and pedagogy merge powerfully in a specific positive education initiative: Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF), a mandatory United States Army program for building resiliency, psychological fitness, and well-being in soldiers. Drawing on composition and rhetoric, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and utopian theory, Pedagogies of Happiness concludes by sketching pedagogical alternatives to positive education's contradictory and conservative curricula, and inserts a utopian critique, arguing that future discussions need to consider not only individual resiliency but also social justice.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
