¿Docentes más sociables y competentes? El uso del humor como estrategia docente en Educación Superior

Abstract

Humor, as an interpersonal phenomenon, occurs frequently in teaching-learning contexts. Althoughempirical research has shown the positive impact of humor on the classroom atmosphere and studentmotivation, as well as how humor facilitates the acquisition of knowledge and skills, some professorscontinue to express their doubts and reluctance about the use of humor as a regular tool in their uni-versity classes. Beyond individual differences, this may be due, in part, to the fact that the cheerfuland apparently informal nature of humor may be in contradiction with the traditional view of universityprofessors (i.e., authority, rectitude, seriousness, etc.). However, to the best of our knowledge, thereis little empirical evidence on how the use of humor in class (vs. a non-humorous or serious teachingstyle) may influence how college students value their faculty. While one might expect the use of humorto favor a view of the teacher as a more friendly and approachable professional, there are more doubtsabout how it might affect other inferred qualities of the teachers such as perceived competence or res-pectability. Using an within-subject design, a sample of college students was exposed to two indepen-dent scenarios—counterbalanced in their order of administration—in which a university teacher used(vs. did not use) a humorous teaching style on the first day of class (e.g., jokes, use of memes, etc.).In both conditions, after the exposure to the scenario, university students were asked to evaluate eachteacher using a series of adjectives. As anticipated, university professors who used humor in their clas-ses were evaluated as more fun, approachable, pleasant, and socially skilled, than the ones that did notuse humor. Those who deploy humor as a teaching strategy were also perceived as more intelligent,but at the same time as less formal and less respectable by their students. There were no significantdifferences in the impressions caused by the two types of teachers in terms of perceived competence.These results are discussed in relation to the observed effect sizes and previous literature on the useof humor as a teaching-learning strategy.