No Laughing Matter: Why Educators Need to Take Humor More Seriously

Abstract

Humor may make people laugh, but linguistically it is no laughing matter. This paper proposed to the educators, teacher preparation programs, and educational researchers who need to take humor and the related phenomenon of play more seriously in their approach to understanding the dynamics of classroom interaction and how challenging humor and play can be to interpret and navigate as they unfold spontaneously in teacher-student interactions. This study aimed to identify the kinds of metacommunicative awareness that teachers, particularly novice educators, need to develop to navigate the interactions they engage with successfully. Meta communicative awareness referred to a deep-seated understanding of how meaning in interaction is constructed and an ability to step outside one’s immediate interpretive frame. The study was conducted between 2016 and 2018 in a community-based afterschool program. The program serves adults and children in the surrounding area who identify as Bangladeshi. The data were collected through audio-recorded interviews with 18 university participants, approximately 40 hours of audio-recordings of homework help sessions, samples of university students’ notes and reflective writing from their time as volunteers, and samples of the children’s schoolwork. The homework helpers were undergraduate and graduate students from two universities. Some of the homework helpers were pursuing master’s degrees in education. They aspired to careers as teachers, and others had volunteered for the program to fulfil institutional community service requirements. At the program, these homework helpers were referred to as “volunteers,” and they occupied both the institutional and interactional role of “educator” concerning the children. It can be concluded that humor and play-interpreted talk in educational settings quite challenging. Moreover, a failure to recognize talk as play could have serious consequences for what ultimately happens between teachers and students and how they come to see one another.