Instructors, Be Careful About Joking Around: Science Students Find Topics About Own Identity Offensive

Imagine students sitting in a college classroom where attendance is required. The instructor is describing how the body works to maintain homeostasis and then the instructor tells a joke. How would you respond? Well, studies indicate that your response may depend on who you are.

Humor as a powerful classroom tool

A major objective of educators and instructors is to get students motivated and engaged in their classrooms. One way that instructors can create more engaging spaces for students is through the use of humor.

Humor may be particularly helpful for science instructors to engage with students since they have been previously described by students as uninteresting and unfriendly. Humor can help instructors appear to be more relatable and like a “real person” to their students, potentially driving student motivation.

However, humor has to be taken as funny for it to be an effective way to actually foster student engagement. A previous study conducted by our lab found that not all instructor humor is perceived by students as funny. Humor that is seen as offensive can decrease student sense of belonging, decrease attention to content, and decrease how much students relate to the instructor. While humor can be wielded as a positive tool in the classroom, the type of humor matters and it can impact women and men differently (Cooper et al., 2018). These results prompted us to further investigate whether humor is interpreted differently depending on who the student is.

One’s perception of humor is highly dependent on native language and culture

A lot of humor is language and culture dependent. Any instructor who tries to use a joke about an outdated pop culture reference that is no longer familiar to students knows how dependent a joke is on the context. Puns are only funny if one gets the wordplay. We found that non-native English speaking students were less likely to find jokes about a variety of topics funny compared to native English speaking students (Cooper et al., 2020). For example, non-native English speaking students found jokes about science, television, food puns, sports, students, and politics to be less funny than native English speaking students.

Humor about one’s own social identity or background was often perceived as offensive

We found that African American students were more likely to be offended by jokes about African Americans than white students, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to be offended by jokes about Republicans, LGBTQ+ students were more likely than non-LGBTQ+ students to be offended by jokes about gay or lesbian people and transgender people, and Muslims were more likely than Christians to be offended by jokes about Muslims (Cooper et al., 2020).

Being mindful about the classroom engagement tools you use

While humor can positively help students, instructors should be cautious when joking about cultural and social identity groups in order to avoid offending students. One simple way to avoid offending students is to not make jokes about social identities and backgrounds. This seems obvious, but studies have shown that instructors do joke about these things (Bryant et al., 1980; Javidi et al., 1989).

Instead, joke about cute animals, your latest adventures in reality tv, or the weather. Although that joke about someone’s identity may garner a laugh, think twice before doing it because you are likely offending someone in the classroom. Even if you are making a self-deprecating joke about your own identity, think about how that might impact a student who shares that identity and may not want people laughing at it. Ways to engage students can come in many different forms and humor can be a useful tool, but only if we are being inclusive for students from different backgrounds.

For more information on humor and identity in the college science classroom please check out these articles:

• Bryant, J., Comisky, P. W., Crane, J. S., & Zillmann, D. (1980). Relationship between college teachers' use of humor in the classroom and students' evaluations of their teachers. Journal of educational psychology, 72(4), 511.

• Cooper, K. M., Hendrix, T., Stephens, M. D., Cala, J. M., Mahrer, K., Krieg, A., ... & Jones, R. (2018). To be funny or not to be funny: Gender differences in student perceptions of instructor humor in college science courses. PloS one, 13(8).

• Cooper, K. M., Nadile, E. M., & Brownell, S. E. (2020). Don’t Joke About Me: Student Identities and Perceptions of Instructor Humor in College Science Courses. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, 21(1).

• Javidi, M. N., & Long, L. W. (1989). Teacher use of humor, self‐disclosure, and narrative activity as a function of experience. Communication Research Reports, 6(1), 47-52. 

Post author
Erika Nadile is a first-year PhD student in Sara Brownell's Biology Education Research Lab at ASU. She is passionate about broadly exploring inequities in undergraduate biology classrooms.