Positive psychology and social pedagogy based classroom environment is conductive to enhancement of spiritual intelligence, suggests researcher

According to Dr Lalit Kishore, whose paper was accepted for a national conference, a classroom based on positive psychology and principles of social pedagogy can work as a conductive medium for enhancing spiritual intelligence.

Abstract of the paper "Towards an interface between spirituality and pedagogy via positive psychology sketch note and abstract of focus group discussion" is as follows

"Educating children of deprived and marginalized groups through innovative alternative education methods is regarded as social work by NGOs. Keeping this view, an exploratory attempt was made to find the interfacing elements bet between pedagogy and spirituality using the focus group methodology. A focus group (N=3; one hour) consisting of a spiritual educator, pedagogue and a psychologist was organized by the investigator as the coordinator. The topic for the focus group was ‘How pedagogy and spirituality can be interfaced for classroom instruction?’ The discourse analysis of the focus group revealed that the pedagogy as ‘science of teaching and learning’ and spirituality as ‘science of living or existential understanding of life’ can be interfaced by integrating the elements of positive psychology. The spiritual assumption that ’all are the same soul’ is basic to treating all learners treating as ‘dormant divine’ and hence worthy of high esteem and respect as members of the same learning community with the teacher as a senior co-learner. Being optimistic and providing the positive psychological foundations to teaching-learning processes using co-operation, caring and sharing as educational values is important for interfacing. Positive psychology based cooperative learning techniques and learners as seekers of the joy of learning were indicated as the main interfacing elements between pedagogy and spiritually by the focus group discourse analysis. For the joy of learning, constructed knowledge needs to be internalized through visual arts and language art forms of poetry and singing speech. These pedagogical tools needed to be incorporated in the instructional processes. The implications for the outcome of the interfaced model are curriculum reorganization and transaction on the basis of the interfacing elements of pedagogy and spirituality." 

Keywords: Classroom processes, focus group, interfacing strategy, pedagogy, positive psychology, spirituality.