Resources

A book excerpt that discusses a variety of ways to improve classroom discussion: getting students to view problems more critically and creatively, analyzing how teachers group students for instruction, pace a discussion, and use questioning and listening to engage students.

An article that looks at several ways to promote successful classroom discussions to increase students' comfort with the specialized language and methods of a field, develop critical thinking, and develop problem-solving skills.

An article that reviews progress scholars and institutions have made to reshape the potential connections between faculty research and student learning, since Ernest Boyer’s landmark 1990 essay, “Scholarship Reconsidered” – developing our understanding of the research evidence, focusing on course design, and starting to reshape institutions.

Extended and nuanced conference paper on the issues around evaluating web content, by the director of Libraries at Babson College.

Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson’s useful summary of what decades of educational research indicates are the kinds of teaching/learning activities most likely to improve learning outcomes.

This study replicated and extended Wanzer et al.'s (2006) typology of appropriate and inappropriate teacher humor and advanced explanations for student interpretations of teacher humor. Three explanations were advanced for why teacher humor may be perceived as inappropriate by students. First, disposition and incongruity-resolution theories were used to explain the cognitive and affective elements of teacher humor, second, student communication predispositions were advanced as an explanation, and the third explanation was teacher communication predispositions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript

Abstract In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a ‘pedagogy of laughter’.The inclusion of laughter alongside problem-posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of the oppressed. In this paper, I examine the role of laughter in Freire’s critical pedagogy through a series of questions: Are all forms of laughter equally emancipatory? Certainly a revolutionary pedagogue can laugh, but should he or she, and what are the political (if not revolutionary) implications of this laughter? In order to shed new light on Freire’s fleeting yet provocative comments, I turn to Jacques Rancière for his emphasis on the aesthetics of politics, and PauloVirno who connects joke telling with critical theory. Overall, I argue that we need to take Freire’s gesture toward a pedagogy of laughter seriously in order to understand the aesthetics of critical pedagogy and the fundamental need for a redistribution of the sensible that underlies educational relations between masters and pupils.

Several studies have examined the pedagogical implications and cautions concerning the use of humor in teaching. Humor has been associated with a host of positive physiological and psychological effects. Researchers have identified that educators who use humor in their instruction are more positively rated by their peers and their students; others have suggested that humor may enhance learning. Although much of this evidence has been anecdotal, the present study assesses the impact of curriculum-specific humor on retention and recall, as well as student evaluations of the course and the instructor. The appropriate use of humor in a classroom setting is discussed and cautions against tendentious humor are addressed.