Elsevier

Nurse Education Today

Volume 30, Issue 6, August 2010, Pages 548-552
Nurse Education Today

Enjoyable learning: The role of humour, games, and fun activities in nursing and midwifery education

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2009.11.007Get rights and content

Summary

Education that captures the attention of students is an essential aspect of promoting meaningful, active learning. Rather than standing at the front of a group of learners simply speaking about a topic, teachers have the opportunity of livening up their teaching with humour, games, and other fun activities. This article critically evaluates the benefits and limitations of humour within nursing education as well as the use of games and fun activities as teaching strategies. Examples of various games and interactive activities are also provided.

Introduction

Nursing and midwifery students have become accustomed to living in a fast-paced, highly technological world where audio-visual stimulation is constant and an abundance of new knowledge is easily accessible via multimedia and the Internet. Nurse educators are thus challenged to teach in a manner that catches the interest of students and maintains their motivation to learn. One way teachers can draw students into a learning experience is by using humour and enjoyable, interactive activities.

The purpose of this article is to explore the positive and negative effects of laughter in the classroom. ‘Fun’ teaching strategies will also be examined including various techniques and activities teachers can use for large or small group lectures, seminars, clinical teaching, and e-learning. Educational theory will be integrated throughout this paper in order to support the discussion with recommendations from the nursing literature about humour and fun in education.

Section snippets

Humour in education

The issue of humour in education is a heatedly debated topic and concerns around the use of laughter to aid learning have been present for a long time. It is a societal norm for comedians and celebrities to rely on comedy within documentaries and training videos to liven up so called ‘dry’ subjects. Within clinical practice, nurses are accustomed to using humour as a coping mechanism to relieve tension and to help ‘humanise’ the health care experience for themselves as care givers as well as

Fun in education

One way of injecting humour into education is to utilize games or other fun activities as teaching strategies. This moves away from the traditional, teacher-centered, ‘talk and chalk’ lecture delivered in a didactic manner where students are passive listeners to the information being imparted on them (Race, 2002). Instead, humour can be used with a humanistic approach which has a greater emphasis on active learning. Students are then motivated to interact and to be engaged throughout the

Conclusion

Today’s students have experiences of interactive learning that could be quite different from that of their lecturers. There is increasingly less hierarchy in the class room and the current styles of gathering and passing information are often more peer and group orientated. Nurse educators have the opportunity to work in more diverse ways and to incorporate different approaches to learning than those used by teachers when they were students.

The appropriate use of humour, games and fun

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