What Humor Does and What Hilarity is For: Sharing the Silly Side of Multilingual Elementary Classrooms

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

Abstract

Objectives: This study ponders how humor– as a pedagogical practice or tool– might foster classroom spaces that invite students to engage in language learning. By documenting moments of humor in lower elementary classrooms serving multilingual learners I gained an understanding of the relationships between classroom culture, humor, multilingual learners, and teaching practices.

Framework: This study’s framework merges sociocultural and humanizing perspectives to focus on classroom culture formation, language learning, and humor. Each foreground learning with students that might occur in classrooms where humor is used (Freire, 1970). Considering that humor is culturally and linguistically informed (Dienhart, 1999; Shively, 2013), individualized by the idea of one’s sense of humor and personal experience (Bell & Pomerantz, 2015; Secară, 2013), and socially situated, relations among students and teachers can strengthen or fray with power assertions, tensions, and miscommunication (Dynel, 2017; Mouton, 2015; Wulf, 2010). Therefore, humor offers a pedagogical mechanism for inviting or ostracizing students’ language resources into English-centric classrooms, one worth understanding.

Methods: Rooted in critical ethnography, this study involved embedded fieldwork in classrooms of two Kindergarten and first grade teachers at a Title I, public elementary school in the Southeastern U.S. I took a case study approach (Yin, 2009), which is attuned to the nuance and evolution (Compton-Lilly, 2012) of a multilingual space.

Data: The data sources include fieldnotes from participant observations, video and audio recordings from participants’ interviews, classroom lesson footage, photo artifacts, and analytic and affective voice memos. A mixture of qualitative methods, including rounds of descriptive and thematic coding, was implemented for deep sensemaking around the construct of humor (Saldaña, 2021). The data corpus was enriched, and member-checked throughout the study with teacher video debriefs.

Results: To understand humor in these contexts, I used a grounded theoretical perspective to identify emerging themes. Three humor forms that operationalize silliness in the classrooms emerged: 1) Traveling humor; 2) Power shifting humor; and 3) boundary-play humor. The ways in which verbal or physical jokes reappeared, and teachers’ intentionally embraced mirth, disregarding their archetype or assumed authority to draw students to a lesson, fostered a robust learning community. Students also used various humor forms to stretch, push, or question the boundaries of the learning environment. It is through these discoveries that we see what humor does and is for in multilingual interaction and language learning.

Significance: This study aims to shed light on the relationship between humor as pedagogy for classroom culture building and multilingual language learning, ultimately to improve educational outcomes for all students, particularly multilingual students. Instruction that leverages humor towards language learning and classroom culture development is particularly promising as an aspect of teaching, recognizing the humanity of multilingual learners, who are more often positioned on the margins in classroom settings. This contribution to teacher learning and language and literacy research is especially significant because it highlights the importance of affective humorous encounters, and challenges the traditional perspective of language learning as a rigid and serious practice.

Author

• Rachel M. Siegman, Vanderbilt University