In his abstract "Interfacing Spirituality and Pedagogy with Elements of Positive Psychology" that was accepted for a conference, Jaipur based educator-research Dr Lalit Kishore makes a case for enhancing spiritual intelligence through positive-psychological foundation of education saying that positive psychology based pedagogy can integrate spiritual intelligence and disciplinary learning.
According to Dr Kishore, since Spiritual Intelligence (SI) has been incorporated as a component of Multiple Intelligence Learning Theory propounded by Developmental Psychologist Howard Gardner, therefore, educators and researchers must look for ways to integrate SI through classroom curricular interventions.
He adds that since educating children of deprived and marginalized groups through innovative alternative education methods is regarded as social work by NGOs, therefore, they can take the initiative in this regard.
"Keeping this in 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. Discussion on ‘How pedagogy and spirituality can be interfaced for classroom instruction?’ and its discourse analysis revealed that 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." he added
He held that positive psychology based cooperative learning techniques and learners as seekers of the joy of learning were the main interfacing elements between pedagogy and spiritually lead to the joy of learning and constructed knowledge being internalized through visual arts and language art forms of poetry and singing speech.
Keywords: Classroom processes, focus group, interfacing strategy, pedagogy, positive psychology, spiritual intelligence
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