Different models from positive psychology have been successfully employed to boost student engagement and increase learning capacity. With conflict, either at individual level as well as group or national level becoming more a norm than an exception in various contexts, this paper aims to explore and illustrate how positive psychology can be used to keep mixed groups of students – Czechs, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, Kazaks, Slovaks – interested, engaged, focused and feeling safe in volatile and unpredictable times.
The model discussed is being applied in language classrooms at the Skoda Auto University in the Czech Republic to foster engagement but particularly to keep spirits high in these troubling times. The paper aims to illustrate how Seligman’s PERMA model prevailed in maintaining a sense of normality in the classroom.
Focused on enhancing positive emotional responses, PERMA is also an improved predictor of psychological distress. This means that proactively working on the components of PERMA not only increases aspects of wellbeing, but also decreases psychological distress which is crucial not only in fostering learning but mostly in establishing a relationship in the classroom that will allow mixed groups of students to work together toward common projects and share accomplishments, regardless of detrimental factors as stress, fear, disengagement or even prejudice.
This paper explores how all these aspects translate into the classroom. While the case studies are chosen from language and competencies courses, the lessons learned can be reproduced for other types of courses regardless of the topic
