Cultivating Teachers' and Students' Character Strengths in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Positive Psychology Perspective

Submission Deadline: 30 March 2026 View: 426 Submit to Special Issue

Guest Editors

Prof. Ali Derakhshan

Email: aderakhshanh@gmail.com

Affiliation: School of Applied Linguistics, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran; School of English Education, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

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Research Interests: educational psychology, technology in language education, teacher education, learner individual differences, and cross-cultural interpersonal factors in language education

Prof. Claude-Hélène Mayer

Email: cmayer@uj.ac.za

Affiliation: Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

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Research Interests: transcultural mental health, salutogenesis, transcultural conflict management and mediation, existential positive psychology (EPP), women in leadership, shame and love across cultures, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and psychobiography

Prof. Lili Qin

Email: smilingtou@163.com

Affiliation: Faculty of the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics and the School of English Education, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

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Research Interests: second language acquisition (SLA), sociocultural theory, and the psychology of language teachers and learners

Summary

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) into educational contexts has profoundly reshaped pedagogical practices, classroom interactions, and the nature of learning itself. While AI and GenAI-driven innovations, such as adaptive learning platforms, automated assessment tools, and generative language models, have enhanced efficiency and personalized instruction, they also pose critical challenges to the cultivation of core human values within education. Amid this technological transformation, there is an urgent need to foreground the development of teachers' and students' character strengths—those enduring, morally valued traits that underpin human flourishing.

Drawing on the principles of positive psychology (PP1.0, PP2.0, and PP3.0), this special issue advocates for a systematic inquiry into how character strengths can be intentionally cultivated in AI-enhanced educational environments. More specifically, this special issue seeks
• To investigate how AI integration influences the activation, suppression, or transformation of character strengths among teachers and students;
• To design and implement educational interventions that align AI affordances with the deliberate development of teachers' and students' character strengths;
• To develop and propose theoretical models mapping the dynamic interplay between AI technologies, character strengths, and teachers' and students' flourishing.

Aims and scope
This special issue particularly welcomes empirical studies that explore how character strengths can be nurtured in AI-enhanced educational contexts. It seeks to deepen our understanding of how teachers and students draw upon and develop strengths in classrooms increasingly shaped by advanced technologies. Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
• The impact of AI and GenAI on the development of teachers' and students' character strengths
• AI and GenAI in teacher professional development
• Character strengths as mediators of AI/GenAI-related challenges
• The ethical implications of AI and GenAI in the context of character development
• The challenges and opportunities of using AI and GenAI to assess character strengths
• Longitudinal studies on AI/GenAI integration and character strengths
• Cross-cultural perspectives on AI/GenAI and character strengths

Note 1: In addition to the topic of this special issue, the topic of the manuscript should be in line with the scope of the journal.
Note 2: The structure and framework of the article must conform to the preferred style of this journal.

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