Using Humor in Online Teaching: Struggles and Success Stories

Using Humor in Online Teaching: Struggles and Success Stories

John Rucynski, Okayama University

Peter Neff, Doshisha University

As we gain experience as teachers, we acquire certain tricks of the trade that become integral components of our teaching repertoire. For many teachers, one essential tool is humor. Humor has been shown to make language classes more memorable, reduce learner anxiety, and improve class atmosphere (Reddington & Waring, 2015; Bell & Pomerantz, 2016).

The sudden shift to emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 presented teachers who like to include humor in their lessons with a catch-22. On the one hand, humor seemed like a potentially even more powerful tool for helping learners relax during such an unprecedented situation. On the other hand, factors such as nonverbal cues and less contagious laughter may have made it much more difficult to incorporate humor into online instruction compared to F2F classes (Henderson, 2021).

This narrative presentation will explore both the challenges and successes teachers experienced using humor in online instruction. The presenters will begin by sharing the importance of humor in their own pre-pandemic teaching. This will be followed by a dialogue in which they contrast differing perspectives of other teachers’ own journeys of incorporating humor into online classes. While some teachers struggled to use humor effectively in this new format, others enthused over the unexpected possibilities offered by the novelty of this new teaching environment. Perspectives will be shared from qualitative responses from a survey and follow-up interviews conducted by the presenters.