Argues that humor is an international language and phenomenon that retains, in the transposition, its own subtle boundaries, and that the essential duality at its core will continue to require familiarity with the contours and mixed reality of the chosen homeground. (RAE)

This article provides a rationale for using humor to increase creativity in gifted students and suggests a variety of activities which focus on humor. (DB)

Discusses the benefits of using humor in the workplace. Offers guidelines for using humor at work, and gives examples of effective ways to use it. (SR)

Assistant vice president for academic personnel at public university took notes on incidents that caused participants to laugh during meetings of academic managers between 1988 and 1993. Recorded percentages of males and females in attendance, who conducted meeting, and who initiated laughter. Found differences in how men and women used humor to…

Notes that caregivers of the dying would do well to consider the prescriptive power of humor when confronting the challenges of healthy care for the terminally ill. Addresses laughter as the best medicine not only for the dying person but also for family and principal caregivers. Includes examples of therapeutic use of humor with the terminally…

Debunks five myths about using humor in training: (1) the subject is too serious; (2) "I'm not funny"; (3) someone will be offended; (4) it won't help; and (5) it is distracting. Suggests that humor builds rapport, encourages creativity, makes learners feel safe, reduces fatigue, and activates long-term memory. (JOW)

Presents an interview with Dianne Monson, 1994 winner of the International Reading Association's Arbuthnot Award, a woman of many talents and enthusiasms, all of which are apparent in the way she approaches both teaching and children's books. Discusses her career as a reader, a critic, and a teacher of children's literature. (SG)

Faced every day with the prospect of getting--and holding--the attention of a room full of students, that ever-resourceful professional known as a teacher resorts to the use of a number of tools and tactics. Among these may be humor. This article presents both examples of the use of humor in the classroom, and resources for further exploration…

Four skits depicting the difficulties faced by famous men and women in science for seeking fund for their research are described. It is a spoof on the History of Science.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, Australian children favour humorous novels; comedic writers consistently dominate the preteen and early teen fiction market in Australia. Regardless of its popularity, however, in comparison to more serious writing, humorous literature has received little critical attention. Of the studies aimed at this area,…

Feminist pedagogy as a research construct can be classified into gender and liberatory subgroups. Gender models frequently focus on learning. Liberatory models underline the social structures and power relations which constitute systems of oppression. Humor in practice may be used as a social corrective, or it may be used to extend power distances…

Humor means understanding not only the language and words but their use, meaning, subtle nuances, the underlying culture, implications and unwritten messages. Humor does not often travel well from one culture to another, as each society has a somewhat different concept of what is funny (Dobson, 1987). In Foreign Language Learning (FLL), the…

While interaction inside the classroom--frontstage discourse--has been a subject of study and has been considered the most significant type of discourse that teachers engage in, I propose that interaction outside the classroom--backstage discourse--is equally significant and has not thus far received as much attention as it merits. This paper is…

The Russian-educated author describes active-learning classroom activities that she created and implemented during her first experience teaching lower- and upper-level undergraduate mathematics courses in the United States. The article begins with a discussion of how the author incorporated humorous stories and memo-pictures into the classroom.…

This project posits that incorporating political humor into the classroom can have a positive effect on learning in higher education. Specifically, we present preliminary findings from a quasi-experiment in which a humorous, "mock" textbook titled America (The Book) (Stewart, Karlin, and Javerbaum 2004) was incorporated into Introduction to…