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Using Humor to Teach and Learn Creatively
Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts 2011
Tony CicconeUniversity of Wisconsin- Milwaukee
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Humor: a couple of important ideas
Main theory: Incongruity resolution
• Three parts:
– Cognitive: what’s going on here?
– Emotional: the feeling of amusement – superiority, relief, satisfaction
– Physiological: laughter
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Humor in the classroom
Humor and the creativity it is based on make teaching and learning more engaging and enjoyable.
– Humor lowers the affective filter (especially self-deprecating humor)
– Humorous stories that make a point about a concept improve retention (caveat: students often remember the story and not the concept)
– Humor builds community
– “It is physically impossible to laugh and snore at the same time.”(Robert Berk, Humor as an Instructional Defribrillator.)
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Humor in the classroom
Humor and the creativity it is based on actually improve learning.
• Indirect, self-report: High “humor orientation” students reported learning more with a high HO teacher
• The opposite is true: Declines in cognitive ability correlate with reduced ability to understand humor
• Humor facilitates thinking by blocking negative emotions such as anger and by encouraging detachment (vs. getting lost in the problem)
• The humorous frame of mind puts us on the lookout for unusual ideas and new ways of putting ideas together (Morreall, and others)
• Understanding humor (“getting it”) is similar to the learning process (“ha ha//Ah ha”)
• Experiencing and creating humor improves the ability to do/see things differently and do/see different things
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Humor in the classroom
Humor and the creativity it is based on improve the study of teaching and learning.
• Seeing/doing/studying familiar things differently
• Seeing/doing/studying different, unfamiliar things
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What we’ll do today
• Research summary
• Control question
• Experience humor (Robin Williams, Inside the Actor’s Studio)
• Create humor (cartoon captioning)
• Reflect on humor, teaching and learning, and the study of teaching and learning
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Testing the Hypothesis
Control question:
How can we make learning more likely to occur in our classrooms, courses, and institutions?
Write as many ideas as you like.
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Experiencing Humor: Example
Robin Williams, Inside the Actor's Studio
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Questions
• “What the hell is going on?”
• Or what and how is Robin Williams teaching us about humor?
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Creating humor
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Back to control question
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What would happen if…?
What would teaching and learning, and the study of teaching and learning, look like if we took these ideas about humor and creativity seriously?
• Creative language (and thinking) resists the inexorable march toward the obvious
• “The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt” that invites systematic inquiry. (John Dewey)
• “To be playful and serious at the same time … defines the ideal mental condition.” (John Dewey)
• The opposite of creativity is the mechanical and the perception of the mechanical where we expect the living is what makes something funny (Henri Bergson)
• The search for incongruity and critical thinking
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Some final thoughts from students
• My thinking has changed in the way that I will not think about how things appear on the surface. There is a lot more to the world, and thinking outside the box will give me insights into it.
• I have learned that you can never discuss, analyze, listen,
comprehend, and reflect enough to really understand the meaning of something.
• At first it seemed really complex and I just couldn’t get a
good handle on it, but now I feel like I get it. “Getting it” makes you laugh. I like how I “get” why I laugh.