This teaching note presents an active learning exercise using a clip from the television show "The Office." The exercise centers on a promise to pay for the college education of a group of third graders, raising questions about capacity, consideration, offer, acceptance, statute of frauds, revocations, promissory estoppel, and other key…

The sitcom "The Good Place" can be used by management instructors to teach ethical frameworks and concepts. This series, familiar to many undergraduate students in the US, features a Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy who gives mini lectures applied to what the characters are experiencing. These mini lectures can be shown to…

Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just…

This article discusses the legacy of Fred Rogers, and bridges the connections of his work in early childhood development to the needs of older students. The author draws upon her own experiences as a child watching "Mister Roger's Neighborhood," and as a teacher who has tried to incorporate several of his ideas into her own high school…

Utilizing popular murder-mystery texts that transcend boundaries of race, class, age, and sex, students apply Toulmin's 1958 concept of claim, data, warrant (Toulmin, S. E. 2003. The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press). Ultimately, students engage in an activity that demonstrates how argumentation plays a role outside of the college…

Sci-fi has the power to open dialogue because its alternate world-building enables students to feel far enough from reality to discuss social problems unreservedly. In this essay, I review an assignment I developed using "Black Mirror" and "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" that present episodes in which militarized policing,…

Course: Media Theory and Methods. Objectives: (1) To understand and apply social justice perspectives and pedagogical strategies to the study of content analysis. (2) To recognize and transform how social scientific practices in content analysis contribute to the marginalization of specific gender and sexuality portrayals on television.

This paper discusses the ways in which the teacher is recognised through the formulation of evaluation frameworks which encompass criteria for so-called effective teaching and, by extension, effective learning. It argues that the emphasis on that which is 'effective', and therefore measurable, is symptomatic of an overly technicist understanding…

This activity provides students with a way of understanding expectancy violations theory (EVT) by examining incidents that occurred during televised award shows. In this activity, in small groups, students will delve into well-known award-show incidents, such as Will Smith's slapping of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, to understand the…

This paper uses the PBS Nova show "Mind Over Money" to introduce a number of topics in behavioral finance. Instructors can also use the video as a jumping off point for expanding the discussion to the "second generation" of behavioral finance, where many of the decisions that differ from what are considered optimal are due to…

Over the past 20 years, root cause analysis (RCA) has become one of the most widely used retrospective methods for detecting safety hazards in medicine and healthcare. Despite its wide use in management practice and growing popularity in academic research, there is currently a dearth of coverage of RCA in popular healthcare management textbooks…

By using the "Game of Thrones" pop-culture television series, the author has structured courses in a way that seeks to solve problems that plague many history courses serving university requirements. In this article, the author will discuss how gaming the classroom can serve as a solution to the issue of engaging majors and non-majors…

Nonprofit commercials are an inspiring but often overlooked resource in language teaching. Teachers can use these short and thought-provoking films in different scenarios with communicative language activities and strategies and to help students practice skills that form part of Bloom's so-called higher-thinking skills, such as creating (using…

Teaching about sexualities and the LGBTQ+ movement today is full of pitfalls and possibilities. While growing acceptance of at least some segments of the LGBTQ+ community means students are more open to talking about these issues than ever before, two serious barriers remain: (1) The rise of Trump has empowered antagonistic students to utilize the…

Challenges to identity formation often emerge during college experiences as one's world view is confronted by exposure to new social circles, ideas, and cultures. Through the analysis of interpenetrating identities in the popular television show, "The Big Bang Theory," students are able to locate concrete examples of the four frames of…