Learning by mistake: the role of humour in active learning
Learning by mistake: the role of humour in active learning
Wendy Johnston
What is the idea?
Many students fear assessed skills presentations. Experiences of observing students undertaking such assessments and seeing the anxiety and stress they can create led me to explore the use of humour as a pedagogic tool and became the catalyst for the development of an innovative method of teaching and learning which is a departure from the norm. Humour creates positive learning environments which actively engages students, encourages reflection, improves retention, and helps relieve anxiety and stress for students. This chapter discusses how humour can be utilised as a powerful instructional tool enabling students to learn from their mistakes by observing what not to do!
Why this idea?
Assessed skills demonstrations/presentations can be stressful for students, raising anxiety levels and making them prone to uncharacteristic errors. I have witnessed many of these and reflected on how analysis of the mistakes could provide useful reinforcement of the correct method of practice. From observing students undertaking assessed food demonstrations, seeing the mistakes that they made, the stress that it caused, and the detrimental impact poor performance had on student’s grades, led me to identify alternative, more effective, teaching strategies.
The summative assessment for the Food and Media module (L5) requires students to deliver a live demonstration to showcase their developed recipe and complete all stages within a 15-minute time frame. Students must control what they are doing whilst effectively interacting with a live audience and ultimately produce an edible dish. Students struggled to present in front of their peers and tutors, and if they made a mistake, it impacted negatively on the remainder of their demonstration and their grades suffered. I therefore reflected on how effective positive analysis of the mistakes could provide useful reinforcement of the correct method of practice and if the use of humour could help break down barriers and create a more relaxed environment. I wanted to create a receptive learning environment which allowed students to feel comfortable when practising their demonstration skills, to reflect on, analyse and learn from their mistakes in a positive constructive way, to break down barriers to learning and to improve retention of information. Laughter is one of the most successful defences we have to combat problems, being an effective means of dealing with mistakes made by academics or students in a kind and considerate manner (Welker, 1977). Laughter also helps diffuse embarrassing situations for both students and lecturers within the classroom (Sudol, 1981).
Although many contend that teaching is a serious business and we are not supposed to be entertainers (Berk, 1996), I actively chose to incorporate humour into teaching and learning and to harness it as a strong tool of communication (Kocak, 2018), to create an element of