The purpose of this article is to show that health and physical education (HPE) teachers who implement humor in the classroom intentionally create a more relaxed classroom environment, build stronger relationships with students, and engage students in the learning process. Humor used as an instructional strategy eases teacher stress and engages…

Humour is discussed in this article in relation to drama education in Ireland. Humour is identified as a potentially important feature of children's engagement in drama, and this is explained by an exploration of humour theory. Examples of how humour positively affects the experience of drama participation are also considered. The discussion is in…

Games in the classroom is not a new concept. Simulations, board games, and online games are popular methods of incorporating game-based learning or gamification into the classroom. However, newer and more humor-based games popular with student populations, such as Cards Against Humanity, a popular card-based party game, have produced some…

The practice of "memes" -- taking an image from pop culture and adding humorous or inspiring text to it -- are an opportunity for marketing practice. We posit that memes also provide an innovative technique to help students become more engaged in marketing classes. We propose requiring students to submit one or more graded homework…

Classroom engagement is an excellent indicator of students' learning, grades, achievement, test scores, retention, and graduation. However, classroom engagement is heavily dependent on teacher-student interactions. Teachers' role in engaging students in the lesson learned is critical. Using a free and convenient tool, such as teachers' humor, can…

This is an empirical, ethnographic study about middle school students' mathematical joy in a formal math classroom. This study is situated in a year-long Research Practice Partnership with 6th grade mathematics teacher and 21 students in her 3rd block class. Through this collaboration, the teacher and I sought to design tasks to support students'…

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected deep reflection in higher education classrooms: how do we attract and retain students to (temporary but nevertheless increasing) online learning experiences, how do we keep them at our universities and colleges, and how do we give students a learning experience from which they will remember meaningful…

This research investigates the impacts of humor as a communication strategy for teachers in the context of university English learning. The study employs a mixed-methods approach utilizing questionnaires and interviews. The primary aim is to explore the effects of incorporating humor into the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. A…

As colleges moved to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, many instructors found it difficult to maintain student engagement and classroom community in the virtual environment. We developed a semester-long activity for a molecular biology research methodology course where students created, and shared original memes related to course…

A perennial problem for many first-year composition (FYC) instructors is deciding what curricular materials to use to teach their students about rhetoric and composition and how to use those resources to enable their students to practice and hone their writing skills. This dissertation argues that humor writing is a viable option as it offers…

As educators around the world are exploring new approaches to keep students involved in remote learning during the pandemic, we investigated the utility of memes in promoting engagement in the online environment. Medical students enrolled in a human physiology course at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sohar, Oman were provided with an…

This work aims at investigating the educational potentialities of mathematical memes, digital objects belonging to students' out-of-school culture, in combination with classic educational objects as GeoGebra applets. To pursue our goal, we observed a group of 29 12th-grade students who design, create and interact with mathematical memes and…

Literature reveals that the inclusion of humour in lecture sessions has been accepted differently, especially by adult learners. Previous studies reported that humour was associated with students' engagement, while some studies reported that humour interrupted learning sessions and distracted students' attention from learning. Consequently, this…

The primary goal of the study is to investigate the effect of the usage of humor on behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement in online learning. Humorous elements were integrated into the online learning components. The mixed-method study was conducted over 14 weeks with the participation of 74 university students in an online university…

Effective teachers engage their students in multiple ways, and engagement reduces disruptive student behaviors. However, teachers consistently report struggling with classroom management, and their struggle has been linked to teacher turnover. Currently, there is a small but growing body of literature on the use of comedy techniques in the…