Teaching in the digital age has become increasingly challenging for college and university faculty. Application, relevance, and active engagement rather than traditional PowerPoint slide show lectures are what our technology-savvy, socially networked students crave and need to keep their attention and interest levels high. Using a combination of…

In education, one of the vital goals is to improve student success through high-quality teaching. Teachers' pedagogy and knowledge of content coupled with the interactions between the teacher and student is one of the most critical components influencing the academic success of students. The purpose of this study was to examine supportive…

Student attitudes toward having a relationship with a wheelchair user were explored. Participants initially selected one of six opposite gender head shots and subsequently viewed their selection's whole body photograph in a wheelchair along with reading a short biography. Primarily undergraduate Hispanic and Caucasian students (N = 810) were…

This work is based on data collected for a research project aiming to critically investigate issues of primary school sex and relationships education. Teachers are important stakeholders of any educational process, especially when the focus is on sensitive and controversial issues such as the provision of sex education. The aim here is to present…

The present study explored whether students would be attracted to having an intimate relationship with a wheelchair user if participants were able to first see a head shot photo and later read a short biography of the person. Four hundred and eight undergraduate students were surveyed regarding their interest in potentially being friends, dating…

College professors face many pressing challenges: staying current in their disciplines, becoming familiar with new technology, responding to national accountability issues, publishing scholarly research in their fields, and facilitating student learning in their classes. Teaching and learning are complex processes. Humor is a powerful…

Infant-parent play with toys is an early form of social communication, and the toy features (i.e., affordances), as well as the child's language competence, contribute to the developmental level of the play and the types of play actions that occur. This research, conducted in cooperation with a toy manufacturer, investigated how the affordances of…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…

This article examines a group of five ink, pen and wash drawings produced by the Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli in the mid-eighteenth century in Zurich. The drawings were produced for a "Narrenbuch" (Book of Fools) uniting visual images of folly with humorous slogans. The drawings are significant in that they imitate sixteenth-century…

This article draws on interactional pragmatics and a cross-cultural approach (UK, France, Spain) to investigate the negotiation of individual and group identities in two different speech events, parliamentary debates and editorial meetings. The cross-cultural examination of the use of linguistic resources for signalling "social role,…

A central issue in the class size debate is that while cutting class size might lead to improved teaching and learning, it is also possible that it may not if teachers do not seek to exploit the advantages of a smaller class size through an alternative pedagogy. Research suggests that teachers do not change their pedagogy when moving from large…

During these unprecedented complicated times, there is an equally unprecedented need for an informed citizenry. Many of us watch democracy get played out on the 24-hour news networks. Still others bear witness to it in the social commentaries embedded in the entertainment provided by late night comedians like Jon Stewart. Humor provides a largely…

This paper presents an overview of modalities that can be used to make learning statistics fun. Representative examples or points of departure in the literature are provided for no less than 20 modalities. Empirical evidence of effectiveness specific to statistics education is starting to emerge for some of these modalities--namely, humor, song,…

This paper explores a variety of practices and classroom activities that engage the whole student. Grounded in a somatic perspective (from "soma" meaning the body in its wholeness--the integration of thinking, feeling, and acting), the discussion shows how students can be brought fully into learning through movement, music, and…

The Native American Renaissance has generated a number of excellent discussions of tribal humor, including Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins." In the book's pivotal chapter, "Indian Humor," Deloria reminds readers that humor is often simultaneously entertaining and an essential aspect of survival. These discussions of tribal humor are…