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…

Jokes, cartoons, songs, and games can help engage students in discussion and learning key concepts about hypothesis testing.

Jokes, cartoons, songs, poems, and games can be useful ways to engage students in discussion and learning key concepts about regression.

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 article strives to open a window on 'eco-humour', an umbrella term for diverse forms of humour targeting ecological and environmental issues. It encourages readers to consider eco-humour as a valuable, pedagogical toolkit for environmental education and communication. To this aim, eco-humour is, first, put into perspective of humour…

Education is so serious and important an enterprise that like life, death and taxes its excesses need tempering and combating by humour. The author believes that educational lampooning can be a powerful weapon against current orthodoxies.

As digital technologies increase in their capacity to generate, display, and disseminate visual materials via spaces like social media, there is a need for pedagogical practices that support meaning making with visual texts. The purpose of this paper is to present a pedagogical framework for teaching visual literacies with social media memes using…

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…

In this article, I share with the reader my journey into environmental education, and how I came to understand that even an urbanite like me has something to offer. I look to the work of Indigenous scholars to frame the ways in which Indigenous pedagogies, combined with environmental, place-based, and land-based pedagogies, form a matrix of…

In this article, the author shares his fear that students will become accustomed to an educational experience that lacks joy and fun as a result of the changes made to education due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his teaching colleagues have noticed that when students are learning virtually, they act much more as receivers of knowledge than…

The COVID-19 pandemic upended higher education in March 2020 and has continued into 2022. Within days of the international lockdowns, an emergency conversion from face-to-face (F2F) to remote learning occurred. Educators scrambled to convert their in-class teaching into some version of online teaching. The transformations ignited a surge in…

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…

Digital literacy skills are crucial twenty-first-century skills that are required for the successful use of technology and active engagement in today's world. However, there is a lack of effective resources and guidelines for developing English as a second language (ESL) learners' digital literacy skills. Due to their increasingly important and…

Courses: Public speaking; communication courses requiring speeches. Objective: Students will learn how to apply humor principles to speeches through a slideshow method supportive of this goal, and to become more discerning about the possibilities and pitfalls of humorous communication.