Purpose: This study explores how virtual learners perceive the use of humor in instructor-developed videos and their other factors for learning effectiveness in an online course. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a set of qualitative methods flowing from lesson study, to pilot study, to self-declaration of a learning style, to…

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…

Purpose: In this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both…

This article describes a narrative study exploring the challenges that international teaching assistants (ITAs) encounter when using humor in North American university classrooms. Twenty participants were recruited from twelve teaching fields. Each ITA participated in two interviews and a videotaped teaching observation. The participants talked…

While humour and laughter create conditions that are conducive for learning, different forms of children's humour have been given little attention in research on digital media, literacy learning, and multimodal design. Applying a Bakhtinian lens, we analyse carnivalesque videos created by elementary students as part of the formal curriculum. We…

With the recent shift from negative psychology to positive psychology in the field of second language acquisition deeper understanding regarding the transfer and construction of positive emotions within classroom interactions is needed. Inspired by the concept of emotion contagion in the field of psychology, the purpose of this study was to…

There is a growing and inexplicable trend among professors to voluntarily fade into the online pedagogical background and allow someone--or something--to do the teaching for them. The professoriate should be concerned about three kinds of online courses that require minimal preparation: YouTube courses, PowerPoint courses, and publisher courses.…

This article shares the motivation, process, and outcomes of using humorous scenes from television comedies to teach the real world of tax practice. The article advances the literature by reviewing the use of video clips in a previously unexplored discipline, discussing the process of identifying and selecting appropriate clips, and introducing…

Although research on second language (L2) humor and language play is burgeoning, most previous studies have addressed language learners. Thus, L2 teachers in general and EFL teachers in particular have comparatively received much less attention in the literature. The present research, to my knowledge, is the first study in the Iranian context and…

Teaching and learning research typically focuses on learning outcomes relating to the acquisition of knowledge. In this article, we shift focus to a different outcome: student commitment to, and thus successful completion of, a course. By examining the relationship between instructor pedagogical choices and rates of student retention--as measured…

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…

This paper examines the use of instructional humor in higher education settings and makes connections between the levels of student achievement in academics and the influence of appropriate instructional humor. The work of prominent researchers such as Wanzer, Frymier, and Irwin (2010), and Segrist & Hupp (2015), who postulate that…

This article deals with communicative functions of laughter and smiling in the classroom studied using a conversation analytical approach. Analysing a corpus of video-recorded French first-language lessons, we show how students sequentially organise laughter and smiling, and use them to preempt, solve or assess a problematic action. We also focus…

Digital stories (N = 71) were created in partial fulfillment of undergraduate coursework at a large mid-Atlantic university. Based on the alcohol habitus, two major themes emerged: the content present (e.g., dissonance between visual and narrative representations) and the content conspicuously absent from the stories (e.g., first-person…