Connecting Sustainable Human Development and Positive Psychology through the Arts in Education: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Positive psychology and sustainable human development seek to improve the well-being of the individual. To achieve this well-being at the education level, positive education seeks to develop character strengths, and education for development facilitates the development of competencies. Moreover, the literature has demonstrated that the arts in positive education develop individual character strengths, socioemotional competencies and students’ relationship with their environment. Accordingly, in this systematic review, we aim to connect positive psychology and sustainable human development by evaluating the arts in education, based on the concepts of well-being. The results indicate that there are points of confluence between subjective and sustainable well-being, and illuminate the links and their connections between competencies and character strengths, with critical thinking functioning as an important connector between the two. Since character strengths are measurable and educable, we advocate their use as a tool to measure the human development index (HDI) in the education of a specific community. Thus, we are able to evaluate whether the competencies for development are achieved, as well as their role as determinants of the overall wellbeing of the individual. On the other hand, our work highlights the need to increase the number of investigations in this field to enable an empirical evaluation of how these connections are established and if they are efficient and durable.