Browsing by Author "Takkavuori, Veera"

Positive education is a new application of positive psychology. The main purpose of positive education is to increase the well-being of individuals, to wrap learning and well-being in school together, and to harness character strengths as resources. Positive education is used in many Finnish schools. This educational trend is currently very topical, as studies show that mental disorders in children and young people has increased both in Finland and globally. There is little research data on positive education. The views of the working teachers and the experiences of the pupils have been studied in a few master's thesis. The views of classroom teacher students have not been studied nearly at all. The purpose of this thesis was to find out what views do students have on positive education. The study was conducted with qualitative approaches. 26 classroom teacher students from master’s degree participated in the study. The data was gathered by using an electronic questionnaire. The data was analyzed by content analysis. According to this study, classroom teacher students had a positive attitude to positive education, but also critical. Positive education was seen to contribute widely to well-being. The students felt that the focus on well-being was appropriate for their own teach-ing philosophy. Strength-based education was perceived as the core of positive educa-tion. Positive education was thought to focus for the most part on supporting individual needs and development. Individual support that requires strong student knowledge was seen easily to overstress teacher. Students saw that positive education especially bene-fits students with special needs, who often threaten to be criticized for their own actions. Students believe that positive education promotes learning and schooling positively through many factors. Lack of knowledge was seen as a challenge for positive educa-tion. Students felt they knew about positive education a bit. They also pondered the sci-entific origins of positive pedagogy. Students were concerned about the possible way of positive education to ignore challenges in an overly positive way and to neglect the study of academic skills. This study shows that positive education needs more research.