Pedagogical Strategies of Positive Psychology Conforming to Neoliberal Ideologies in EFL Context

Abstract

Neoliberal changes in pedagogy focus on marketization of teaching and learning processes through different innovative interdisciplinary strategies to evoke the collective appeal (Ross, 2007). The concurrent emergence of positive psychology as both exploration of interdisciplinary positive emotional experience and as diagnostically neoliberalistic query (Freeman, 2020) and the complicated entanglement of neoliberalism and emotions (Pilkington, 2016) can imply that the integration of positive psychology into the educational context might be correspondent with a sort of neoliberalistic framing of pedagogy. This issue entails an exclusive scrutiny on pedagogical contexts, where such boundaries often coalesced into totally optimistic streams. Accordingly, this qualitative study aimed at exploring EFL teachers' different strategies in line with the tenets of positive psychology while, simultaneously, complying with the premises of neoliberalistic streams. To this end, postulating its design on Reflexive Grounded Theory, this research collected the data via the qualitative procedures such as questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, field notes, and content analyses. Totally 116 participants, i.e., 52 males and 64 females, purposively screened for homogeneity concerns via Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQ), were interviewed afterwards. Besides, diverse online/offline materials and sources pertinent to the objective were gathered for the analysis through the respective procedures of codification, memoing, categorization, thematization, and theoretical sampling. The qualitative analyses of categorization and thematization yielded five major themes as the final results: legitimation, collective empowerment, logical positivism, wisdom of negotiation, and identification approach, delineating those eudaimonic strategies which can trigger a sort of positive psycho-pedagogy susceptible to neoliberalistic intents. Finally, this study implied raising the consciousness of teachers in the EFL context with regard to the subtle interrelationships between positive psychology and neoliberalistic tenets in accordance to pedagogy.