La Tristeza Compartida Se Divide; La Alegría Compartida Se Multiplica: Perceptions and Possibilities of Familial Humor

• In Event: Humor, School, and Injustice: Understanding Students’ Jocular and Transgressive Humor as Critical Literacy Practices

Abstract

Objectives: In this presentation, I examine the perceptions of third grade minoritized emergent bilinguals (Spanish/English) in a US classroom as they articulate how family members serve as a source of jocularity. By taking a sociocultural perspective on humor as a resource, I seek to render visible the relational and linguistic connections between these students and their families while discussing implications for informing culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Framework: The framework defining specifically what I mean by humor is a combination of three components. The first is affiliative humor, which refers to “the tendency to say funny things, to tell jokes, and to engage in spontaneous witty banter in order to amuse others, to facilitate relationships and to reduce interpersonal tension” (Martin, 2019, p. 309). The second component is self-enhancing, which points to the “tendency to be frequently amused by the incongruities of life, to maintain a humorous perspective even in the face of stress or adversity, and to use humor in coping” (Martin, 2019, p. 309). Finally, this research draws on Yosso’s (2005) sociocultural notion of familial capital and how it can build on the oft-unacknowledged strengths of minoritized students in schools.

Methods: Three methods were used to gather data for this academic-year-long ethnographic study. The first was through a researcher/teacher-led-survey of the emergent bilingual students about how humor intersected with their lives in and outside of school. The second method was through formal interviews with the students after having given them each a disposable camera to photograph the people, places and ideas that caused mirth in their lives. The last source of naturalistic data was collected throughout the school year in the classroom through researcher observations or by an unattended handheld recorder.

Data: The data reported is from 23 elementary-age emergent bilingual students in an urban Title 1 school in Texas with a late-exit bilingual program. The 12 girls and 11 boys had family origins from diverse backgrounds including Guatemala, Florida, Honduras, Mexico, Colombia and Texas. Using coding software MAXQDA and Saldaña’s (2021) method of categorization, I flagged iterations of humor involving family members.

Results: Six categories of students’ conceptualizations of familial humor were discovered: playfulness/light-hearted pranks, polysemous/creative language, jokes/storytelling, funny paralanguaging, laughing with the young, and humor with elders.

Significance: This relationally edifying humor is significant as we seek to provide culturally sustaining practices for Latin@ students in bilingual education. Educators may learn to achieve communicative competence by implementing their students’ notions of humor as a form of socio-pragmatic “language” which could bridge the home-to-school continuum. Bell and Pomerantz (2015) suggest that verbal play…can be “affiliative in that they index the shared knowledge and history between [individuals]” (p. 31). Gutiérrez et al. (1999) also discovered that such activities engendered “a playful world and a collaborative culture that brings play and learning together” (p.88). The objective is to understand how affiliative and self-enhancing humor work and, in what ways it might be leveraged by the students and teachers, incorporated into teacher preparation programs, and theorized by socioculturally-minded researchers.

Author

• Mitch D. Ingram, Texas State University