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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium delves into the 2025 theme of “Research, Remedy, and Repair” by imagining school-based literacy curricula that extend, rather than pathologize, the critical literacy practices of humorous rupture rooted in students’ racially, ethnically, linguistically, and gender/sex diverse communities. Papers offer nuanced insights of how young people across a range of geographical, racial, languaging, and K-12 schooling contexts are engaging humor as a critical literacy practice. Panelists push us to question traditional power hierarchies and offer a pathway to shift the conversation from what students lack to re-center literacy curricula on students’ creative interactions around written and spoken texts that redraw boundaries of what counts as literacy, knowledge, language, and expertise.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Language and Social Processes

Chairs

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University

• Mitch D. Ingram, Texas State University

Papers

• “The World Is Burning and We Live in Hell”: Humor as a Mechanism of Survivance and Critique - David E. Low, California State University - Fresno

• Border-Crossing Humor for Elementary School Learning - Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University

• La Tristeza Compartida Se Divide; La Alegría Compartida Se Multiplica: Perceptions and Possibilities of Familial Humor - Mitch D. Ingram, Texas State University

• What Humor Does and What Hilarity is For: Sharing the Silly Side of Multilingual Elementary Classrooms - Rachel M. Siegman, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University