Abstract
CITATION: Gush, M. & Greeff, A. P. 2018. Integrating positive psychology principles and exercises into a second-language high school curriculum. South African Journal of Education, 38(3): #1638, doi:10.15700/saje.v38n3a1638.
Highlights
In 1998, when Dr Martin Seligman became the president of the American Psychological Association, he used his inaugural address to urge psychology researchers to relax their grip on their almost exclusive focus on the examination of and research into mental illness, and to devote their time and resources to studying that which is good and positive in life, i.e. those aspects that make up a life worth living (Donaldson, Dollwet & Rao, 2015)
In the years that followed, many theories and even more quantitative research have led to the identification of “tried and tested” Positive Psychology interventions (PPIs) (Cohn, Pietrucha, Saslow, Hult & Moskowitz, 2014; Dambrun & Dubuy, 2014; Hanley, Warner & Garland, 2015; Ho, Yeung & Kwok, 2014; Kwok, Gu & Kit, 2016; Layous, Nelson & Lyubomirsky, 2013; Liau, Neihart, Teo & Lo, 2016; Smith & Hollinger-Smith, 2015; Suldo, Hearon, Bander, McCullough, Garofano, Roth & Tan, 2015; Van Woerkom & Meyers, 2015; Waters & White, 2015)
South African adolescents face particular challenges, such as community violence (Kaminer, Du Plessis, Hardy & Benjamin, 2013) and poor living conditions (Reddy, James, Sewpaul, Koopman, Funani, Sifunda, Josie, Masuka, Kambaran & Omardien, 2010; Statistics South Africa, 2016), which compound the difficulties commonly associated with adolescence
Summary
Even though Maslow might be considered outdated, I like to regard this description as a foreshadowing of PERMA in Positive Psychology today, inasmuch as it describes the characteristics and features of a self-actualised/flourishing individual Another earlier development in the realm of successful functioning is that of wellness. This table was created before the development of the textbook, but retrospectively includes the five domains of positive functioning. This conceptual map, in other words, shows how the character strengths and the chosen PPI of each chapter overlap with specific wellness domains, aspects of PERMA, and later the five domains of positive functioning.
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