Name: Jolene Dreier
Home University: University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Summer Courses at DIS: Livability in the Modern City, Positive Psychology
For the next three weeks I will be enrolled in Positive Psychology. A course guided by its mission “to understand and foster the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish.” The course will study what it means to be happy and how human flourishing can be facilitated. It has only been one day and my professor has already engaged the class by allowing us to set our goals.
As a class, we decided that group work; field studies and constant collaboration were all important components to achieving success in this course.
On Thursday, we attended our first field study using Copenhagen as our classroom. This ethnographic field trip will allow us to study why Danes are ranked number 1 in happiness and life-satisfaction. The interaction of actually meeting Danes and listening to their stories will bring a whole new perspective to the class, one you can’t read about in a textbook. Below are a few pictures I captured showing Danes in the Glass Market, a common meeting place. Here you will find many friends and families gathering to eat, drink and stay for conversations.
For the study tour we will be going to Scotland. Unlike the Copenhagen field study, this tour will look at positive psychology on a more institutional level rather than individual level. Having the chance to study the well being of a community and quality of life in a whole other country will provide an outlook that I could only get in a class offered at DIS.