Using Humor to Maximize Living affirms, sustains, and encourages people in the practice of humor, not only as a personal tool to optimize a healthy life style, but also to maximize the benefits of humor in everyday life. Check out the research that includes a review on the use...

Online instruction is rapidly expanding the way professors think about and plan instruction. In addition, online instructional practices are expanding and changing as new tools and strategies are adopted. It is imperative that programs and institutions of higher education explore increased online options that align with best practices to develop effective and engaging online courses. The Handbook of Research on Developing Engaging Online Courses is an essential research publication that provides multiple perspectives on improving student engagement and success in online courses. This book includes topics focused on the online learner, online course content, and effective online instruction. The content contained within the title is ideal for curriculum developers, instructional designers, IT consultants, deans, chairs, teachers, administrators, academicians, researchers, and students.

What is humor exactly? How do you use it to maximize learning? If it is so important, why is it rarely mentioned in teacher preparation without some clues for finding and using it? The purpose of this book is to affirm, sustain, and encourage educators in the practice of humor not only as a personal tool to optimize a healthy lifestyle, but to maximize the benefits of humor in education. These benefits include current research-based data on the use of humor to nurture creativity, to increase the capacity for memory retention, to support an optimal learning environment and to build safe communities that reflect the relational trust necessary for collaborative learning. An environment of fun is an indicator of a culture of trust. Each chapter of this book includes a study group format and powerful practice ideas for leaders. These tools can facilitate creative data analysis for educational leaders interested in understanding the relatively new field of positive psychology and how it can contribute to a joyful learning environment that promotes collaborative relationships.

Tamblyn offers an enlightening and practical look at how teachers and training professionals can inject elements of entertainment, creativity, humor, and emotion into their existing methods, even when dealing with serious or technical topics. Filled with fun, challenging, and thought-provoking exercises, the book also provides dozens of workshop activities and techniques.

What is humor exactly? How do you use it to maximize learning? If it is so important, why is it rarely mentioned in teacher preparation without some clues for finding and using it? The purpose of this book is to affirm, sustain, and encourage educators in the practice of humor not only as a personal tool to optimize a healthy lifestyle, but to maximize the benefits of humor in education. These benefits include current research-based data on the use of humor to nurture creativity, to increase the capacity for memory retention, to support an optimal learning environment and to build safe communities that reflect the relational trust necessary for collaborative learning. An environment of fun is an indicator of a culture of trust. Each chapter of this book includes a study group format and powerful practice ideas for leaders. These tools can facilitate creative data analysis for educational leaders interested in understanding the relatively new field of positive psychology and how it can contribute to a joyful learning environment that promotes collaborative relationships.

A professor of American Studies—and stand-up comic—examines sharply focused comedy and its cultural utility in contemporary society. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, “charged humor,” and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.

Do you experience stress? Are you interested in better health and well-being? Do you pursue happiness? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to read this book. If you answered no, you’re in denial. All of us can use a little help to become happier or healthier. Unfortunately, the help we get is often too scary: “if you don’t do this or that, some catastrophic event of epic proportions will happen.” Prilleltensky’s approach, in contrast, is to help you become healthier and happier through laughter. In this hilarious book, Prilleltensky combines humor with science to help you improve your well-being. Each chapter consists of the Laughing Side, a series of funny stories; and the Learning Side, a research-based, user-friendly guide to health and happiness. The first chapter provides an overview of well-being, while subsequent chapters cover each of its six domains: Interpersonal, Community, Occupational, Physical, Psychological, and Economic (I COPPE). When you finish the book you’ll have a greater understanding of your life, and ways to make it better.