In this article, I explore laughter as a form of multimodal play in which adolescents' engage across contexts and in various configurations. With a few recent exceptions, a focus on unscripted play is largely missing from ongoing research and discussion about the education of adolescents. Whereas the space to play has been vitally important to the…

At Queensborough Community College, the City University of New York, 60% of incoming freshmen were placed into remedial-writing classes in 2001, and 43.9% of these incoming freshmen were from foreign, non-English speaking countries. Before these students could advance into credit courses, they were required to pass both their remedial-writing…