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Discourse Analysis: Developing the Happiness Project
Research Questions:
How have students experienced this revised writing course for multilingual learners that focuses on writing and wellbeing, contemplative pedagogy, and experiential learning?
In what areas might the educational institution fall short in serving international students in particular, and how can schools effectively address these shortcomings?
How does a focus on student wellbeing affect student engagement with learning & campus community and contribute to self-efficacy?
From Discourse to Happiness: The Projects
From Discourse to Happiness: The Projects
The Discourse Project first began through the transcription and analysis of focus group interviews with graduating international students. As students expressed isolation and a lack of access to psychological resources (including parental support), a new course was created: The Happiness Project.
The Happiness Project starts and ends with students. In the first phase, student feedback was collected through metacognitive analysis forms, a standard practice in writing courses. Form findings showed that students experienced positive physical and psychological benefits developed through weekly positive psychology interventions (e.g., mindful walking, gratitude letters) about which they blogged. Students also produced individual podcast shorts based on their Daily Delight Writing: a daily gratitude practice. Students also produced final group podcasts, reflecting on the benefits of course topics including: noticing awe, gratitude mindset, pranayama, sleep hygiene, exercise, time tracking, and random acts of kindness. Future research includes interviewing former students to see if these benefits had lasting effects and how they experienced other writing courses after having engaged with nontraditional writing assignments.
Importance
Importance
Centering students' wellbeing is a topic that needs to be developed and studied, especially as we face a national youth mental health crisis. The idea of "rigor" needs to be problematized and reconceptualized. The project takes data from real-world experiences and brings these issues to the fore, creating an avenue to more readily address them.
What's Next
What's Next
The focus of the research work this year is to continue collecting and analyzing metacognitive data from, and conducting focus group interviews with, former students.
Publications and conference presentations are among the next steps. Professor Helmer is currently working on an article with her former EXPLORE student fellow Millie Hacker. The study is ongoing, and we are very excited to get back in contact with former Happiness Project students for interviews to gain a more long-term perspective of the project's influence.
The Tree of Contemplative Practices showcases some of the shaping forces for development of contemplative pedagogy. Professor Helmer integrates numerous activities based on branches seen here into her coursework and classroom. Historically, student favorites have included walking meditation and journaling.
© The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Discourse Analysis is comprised of many analytic techniques, with different research projects placing more emphasis on certain subtypes. Our project is very Conversation Analysis heavy for instance, so we look very closely at turn-taking and intonation. Because our research focuses on the experiences of multilingual students, much of our work is done through an ethnographical lens.
Mrs. Goodman. "Discourse Analysis." https://medium.com/@alphabetaescoladeidiomas/discourse-analysis-db138951a873
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