Adventure-based learning (ABL) consists of highly structured physical activity with periods of reflection (i.e., debrief) that help promote personal and social development. It can be used as a valid curriculum in physical education to promote intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. This type of curriculum can also help physical educators…

This study examined the behaviors that teachers in eight large urban high schools in a Northeastern state considered important for good teacher-student relationships. A factor analysis of teacher (N = 103) survey responses revealed three factors related to student behaviors: (a) demonstrating engagement and interest in schoolwork; (b) being…

This study explored how White undergraduate students make meaning of cross-racial interaction in order to provide essential knowledge for practitioners who seek to create curricular and co-curricular activities designed to promote productive interactions around race. This study is guided by two overarching questions 1) How do White undergraduate…

Previous studies indicate that the acoustic features of speech discriminate between positive and negative communicative intentions, such as approval and prohibition. Two studies investigated whether acoustic features of speech can discriminate between two positive communicative intentions: humour and sweet-sincerity, where sweet-sincerity involved…

There are thousands of articles, books, essays, dissertations, and more devoted to leadership in higher education. All of them highlight the importance of a person "out front" who is charged with moving the organization forward and people who follow to ensure that movement takes place. The author's favorite definition of leadership is not found in…

In this dissertation I examine the patterns and uses of transgressive humor and sexual talk that male traders from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) indulge in when at their leisure from trading. I investigate how cultural conceptualizations or ideologies are brought into the present moment through discursive interaction and how the cultural signs…

Native speakers of a language learn word play as part of the language acquisition process, but learners of a new language rarely get that opportunity. English has an unusually large number of opportunities for humorous puns, based on the complex system of spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of English words. There are three main categories of…

This study investigated the ability of 23 kindergarten children to construct stories drawing upon genre conventions in order to differentiate simple narrative stories, a familiar and often-visited genre in the kindergarten literacy classroom, and humorous stories, familiar to the children's literacy experiences mostly outside official literacy…

Based on an analysis of 137 texts written by pupils, this paper examines pupils' humour directed at teachers, its types and social functions. The collected data are divided into three categories that describe different modes of teachers as targets of pupils' humour. The first mode describes teachers as unintentionally comical, the second as duped…

Drawing on Vygostky's zone of proximal development this study explores the ways preservice teachers engage with The Human Bean Activity that was designed to make visible the abstract idea of identity and community. This qualitative narrative analysis explores the talk produced by 47 predominantly White, straight, and female preservice…

In this essay Mordechai Gordon begins to address the neglect of humor among philosophers of education by focusing on some interesting connections between humor, self-transcendence, and the development of moral virtues. More specifically, he explores the kind of humor that makes fun of oneself and how it can affect educational encounters. Gordon…

This webtext explores the cynical/kynical humor of soldier videos, suggesting that amateur videos paradoxically both undercut authority and honor effective leaders, both make light of and also publicly reveal deployment hardships, both distance the performers from military groupthink and celebrate unit camaraderie.

This article is a review on billboard liberation and some other projects that develop the idea of talking back or over advertising in a playful and youthful way. In one of them, Ji Lee's Bubble Project, an artist places blank thought-bubble stickers on street advertisements and waits to see what people write on them, completing the work of art and…

There is a line in Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" that applies to any endeavor, but especially teaching. It reads: "That which is essential cannot be seen with the eye. Only with the heart can one know it rightly." The essence of teaching is difficult to qualify, but that line leads directly into the author's most essential criterion. In this…

Analyses of second language (L2) classroom interaction often categorize joking and other humorous talk by students as disruptive, off-task behavior, thereby rendering it important only from a classroom management perspective. Studies of language play, however, have illustrated that such jocular talk not only allows students to construct a broader…