The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 put enormous pressure on educators to quickly adapt course materials for online delivery. In my case, a naturally humorous teaching style clashed with the arid world of computers in a virtual environment, leading me to believe in a reduced teaching effectiveness under such conditions, and that my students…

There is a great deal of misinformation and stigma surrounding abortion, even though it is a common reproductive health service. Teaching about abortion encompasses many things: managing the beliefs of students and teachers; state regulations around teaching or talking about abortion in schools; available resources; and the cultural miseducation…

German fairy tales have an established history of appropriation in popular media, from oral traditions to mobile media. The mimetic quality of fairy-tale motifs and tropes provides ideal conditions for intertextual adaptation. In this article, I demonstrate that German fairy-tale themed music videos are powerful vehicles for culture, parody, and…

Becoming a professional worker involves a wide range of cognitive, social, and cultural processes that have received extensive attention over the past decades amongst various disciplines. It is also not external to language use and communication. Novices in any occupation have to learn technical terms and are expected to master specific discourse…

Student engagement continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing academia today. Educators often possess the knowledge needed to teach a class but lack the technique or approach with which to make the content engaging. In addition, students face myriad distractions as part of their everyday lives, complicating our ability to better connect…

Student attention and engagement in the classroom is an ongoing problem that has generated a considerable amount of press in recent years. Some studies report that student attention begins to fade within 10-18 minutes (Weimer, 2009). While the statistics related to how long students stay attentive and engaged has been questioned (Wilson &…

The rapid advancement of emergent learning technologies has led to the introduction of massive open online courses (MOOCs) which offer open-based online learning courses to a large number of students. In line with the advancement, the Malaysia Ministry of Education has recently initiated Malaysia MOOCs via collaboration with four public…

The use of humour in teaching and learning can be contentious, with some authors suggesting that the efficacy of humorous materials is mediated by the culture of the student. Nevertheless, humour represents a potential vehicle for the introduction of active learning in a classroom setting, as judicious use of humour may lead to a more relaxed…

The storyline of operas, with historical or fictional characters, often include potions and poisons. This has prompted a study of the chemistry behind some operatic plots. The results were originally presented as a lecture given at the University of Minho in Portugal, within the context of the International Year of Chemistry. The same lecture was…

This action research article shares the story of a student teacher and the arduous, but rewarding process of self-reflection. The authors integrate real life examples of the implementation of self-reflective strategies of a student teacher with self-efficacy, teacher life cycle, and effectiveness literature to analyze the student teacher's…

Video recordings of Year 11 physics lessons were analyzed to identify key features of teacher explanations. Important features of the explanations used included teachers' ability to move between qualitative and quantitative modes of discussion, attention to what students require to succeed in high stakes examinations, thoughtful use of…

This webtext explores the cynical/kynical humor of soldier videos, suggesting that amateur videos paradoxically both undercut authority and honor effective leaders, both make light of and also publicly reveal deployment hardships, both distance the performers from military groupthink and celebrate unit camaraderie.

This article demonstrates, using conversation analysis, how students use address terms when reproaching the teacher. The data consist of videotaped lessons of Finnish as a second language in secondary school. The analyses show, first of all, that teacher-oriented address terms can be used separately as reproaches, in which case they are marked…

Problem solving is a critical skill for engineering students and essential to development of creativity and innovativeness. Essential to such learning is an ease of communication and allowing students to address the issues at hand via the terminology, attitudes, humor and empathy, which is inherent to their frame of mind as novices, without the…

Parody is a form of imitation with the added elements of comedic twists, turns, and exaggerations. To create a parody of something, one has to understand it before beginning to alter it for humorous effect. Parodies are used by teachers of writing, music, and art as a method of educating and evaluating students' understanding of the styles of the…