Proceedings of The 5th World Conference on Future of Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Enhancing the Well-Being and Academic Experience of Higher Education Students. The CRAFT Program: Theoretical Framework and Preliminary Research
L. Javier Bartos, M. Pilar Posadas, María J. Funes, Marc Ouellet, Chris Krägeloh
ABSTRACT:
The CRAFT program, grounded in mindfulness, yoga, positive psychology, and emotional intelligence, was conceived as an art of being and a neuroeducational method for self-actualization, fulfilment, and well-being to attend to the highly demanding challenges affecting higher education students involved in specialized educational fields. Since 2017, the CRAFT program— the acronym of which reveals its five elements of Consciencia, Relajación, Atención, Felicidad, and Transcendencia— has been curricularly implemented as CRAFT-based subjects at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Granada, Spain, once a week for 60 min during the entire academic year. The main purpose of the following work will be to explain the theoretical framework of the CRAFT program and provide a summary of the preliminary research findings supporting its potential role for enhancing student musicians’ well-being and academic experience across physical, psychological, cognitive, and emotional dimensions with implications to other educational contexts. Some of the main reported findings from pre-post quasi experimental studies conducted with higher education students musicians include significant improvements in mindfulness skills, positive reappraisal, psychological well-being, and physical flexibility and balance; higher perceived benefits and proactivity amongst CRAFT participants than controls for leveraging CRAFT practices to improve their health and well-being during the lockdown; and a series of perceived benefits related to the five CRAFT elements such as enhanced conscious awareness, emotional self-regulation, psychological distress, mind clearance, concentration, wellness, vitality, hope, equanimity, positivity, and resilience. Further research within longitudinal mixed methods studies will need to be invoked to substantiate these findings.
keywords: mindfulness, yoga, meditation, positive psychology, student musicians.