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.

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…

The present study examined the effect of a pedagogical intervention about humorous verbal irony in Spanish with a mixed group of 40 second language (L2) and heritage speakers of Spanish. Unlike previous studies that have considered only irony comprehension, this project incorporated both comprehension and production of irony into instruction and…

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…

In this inquiry, I explore, expose, and extrapolate upon sociopolitical and environmental absurdism as an environmental academic and educator based in Alberta, Canada--a well-known, and somewhat infamous, centre of oil and gas production and energy development in general. Moving beyond Alberta as a catalytic example, I introduce and discuss…

Since 2008, the Taiwanese government has been establishing Active Aging Learning Centers (AALCs) throughout Taiwan. As of 2021, AALCs had been established in Taiwan's 368 townships and cities, representing a milestone in the development of senior education in Taiwan. This study investigated the experiences of AALC lecturers with various teaching…

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…

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…

The aim of our study is to identify elements of young children's shared humour by observing children's own expressions in the everyday life of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres aged 1-6 in three Finnish ECEC centres. Our analysis shows that young children's humour plays an important role in routine transitions and play situations.…

This study aims to explore the effect of using educational comics or educational cartoons as teaching material in social studies course on students' academic achievement. Also, it is aimed to reveal the experiences of the students regarding the use of these materials. In the study, the embedded design was preferred among the mixed-methods designs.…

Humor has received increasing attention in environmental educational research in recent years as it can have a variety of positive effects on learning atmosphere, outcomes, and student-educator relationships. In most cases, humor is used by educators while students act as consumers. However, this does not exploit the full potential of humor for…

Various forms of humor are an important aspect of social interactions, even at an early age. Humor comprehension is a repertoire that is said to emerge between the ages of 7 and 11 years, and this is primarily attributed to a child's level of cognitive development. The behavioral literature has suggested that various forms of complex verbal…

Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study closely examines moments when an instructor's embodied explanations elicit laughter from his students -- which we refer to as laughing moments -- in an English as a second language classroom. Such laughing moments can exhibit students' attention to the teacher's explanation and also illuminate…

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…

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…