Black, White and Gray
Positive sociology has been inspiring Kentucky residents through the efforts of Beau Weston, the Van Winkle Professor of Sociology and Chair of Anthropology and Sociology of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and a blogger at The Gruntled Center: Exploring the Happy Society. Weston first developed a class he calls “The Happy Society”, using a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to develop his syllabus and run a theory camp with students to test it out.
After a successful first run of “The Happy Society” at Centre College, Weston found out about my class on positive sociology when I was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He became my “Happy Society Teaching Buddy”, which basically means he was my reading partner and pedagogical coach as I taught this class for the first time. I learned from his lessons having taught the class, and innovated the syllabus and assignments to my own class.
This year, Weston’s class took on a new twist. Inspired by the classic Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Weston organized the group into little platoons that had to carry out projects in the community. Small groups, we know from Burke’s insights and much recent research, can inspire ideas and generative creative energy far beyond our own minds.
As reported in the Centre College online newsletter this December 5, 2013:
“Using the idea of ‘little platoons,’ Weston modified the previous year’s happiness project, changing it from one the entire class completed to a group of small partner projects. ‘One of the main findings of happiness research is that working with others—especially friends—on a meaningful project is one of the most reliably happy-making of actions,’ he explains. ‘Thus the ‘little platoons’ project was born.’ Students worked with another classmate and created a platoon that would do something worthwhile. Michaela Manley ’15 and Clark Weber ’14 paired up to bring happiness to a local retirement home, McDowell Place. ‘Michaela and I both enjoy talking to our grandparents,’ says Weber, ‘and we realized that it would be a good idea to write down their happiest memories. We thought we would record memories of other elderly individuals in the community.’ “
Weston’s project resembles what I’ve done in the Calhoun Happiness Project, in which everyone had to choose a happiness buddy. This coming spring, I would like repeat in the Calhoun Happiness Project an assignment I devised at UNC: asking students to pick a student group they belong to (a sports team, publication, student government, etc.) and try to apply the principles of positive psychology and positive sociology to improve that group. To guide students next spring, I plan to have them read Ryan W. Quinn’s Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Organization. (The Lift blog has all kinds of great ideas…)
It’s only fitting that since my collaboration with Weston t started in part because I blogged right here on Black, White and Gray about my positive sociology class at UNC, that now I should blog about his successful class. It’s also striking that in teaching this material, we both independently reached a similar conclusion: happiness is not just an idea, it should be a practice, and we all benefit from having happiness buddies or little platoons to keep us focused on our resolutions and projects to improve our lives and that of those around us. Our students have obviously inspired our respective schools’ publications to write about our course, and the Calhoun Happiness Project has now been in the Yale Herald, the Yale Daily News and the Yale Alumni Magazine. Isn’t it great to see good news in the media, the classroom and the community?
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