“This screenshot of a CAC Zoom meeting recreates a recurring moment of confusion in our appointments. In the chat box, you can read my instructions to an imaginary student on how to find certain resources online. The chat exchange features the confusion that is caused by complexity, in turn being a result of our responsiveness to the pandemic, moving in and out of ever-changing spaces offered by new technology.” – Kaveh Tagharobi

Kaveh meets with a student in Zoom to help them navigate the new LMS.

Here, I am referring a student to our resource site on Brightspace, created in response to our sudden online migration. However, this new accessibility solution poses its own challenges: one student cannot access Brightspace, one struggles with downloading files, and yet another is confused by the site’s structure despite our best efforts. Responding to a new challenge that blooms out of the very strategy you just devised to respond to an earlier challenge might prove a bit like a Sisyphean task. However, as you can see in the chat string, we, alongside the students, try to resiliently move forward by constantly exercising flexibility, compassion, and humour, hoping we, and not the virus, have the last laugh!

Teaching strategies

While the importance of flexible* and compassionate** approaches to teaching are quite well-discussed and appreciated, many educators in higher education might hesitate to use humour as a teaching strategy. It might be due to this unspoken consensus on shunning the funny side in academia, which is conventionally associated with seriousness, that I, with a seriously funny side by nature, rarely broke character as an earnest teacher. However, in the last two years as we all adapt to shifting university expectations, I have found how injecting even a bit of good-natured humour can help not just students but also myself to build resilience. I might not want to bring a full comedy act to each class (especially considering the sensitivities that can be triggered with inappropriate jokes), but just simply laughing at the complexities of our post-pandemic world can go a long way by relieving some of the mounting pressure. Moreover, when I make a joke about “our shiny new resource site” not working, I am not just helping the students relax; I also show that the irony of causing more problems while trying to solve another problem is not lost on me, demonstrating a form of self-awareness that eventually can help make me more relatable. While being a very effective brand of humour, laughing at our own failures as educators can be a great way to connect to learners by sharing vulnerability, acknowledging the inherent difficulty of the situation, and inviting them to be kind to themselves.

* (for a select number of studies spanning across the last three decades, see Dennis et al., 2020; Burge et al. 2011; Thomas, 1995) ** (see White & Ruth-Sahd, 2020, Wolpow et al. 2009, and Fien, 2003)

Kaveh Tagharobi

I have had the pleasure of helping UVic students with academic communication since 2013. As a former international graduate student and a long-time instructor with EAL (English as an additional language) and EAP (English for academic purposes) backgrounds, I fully understand student needs and faculty expectations when it comes to university writing, genres, critical reading, and speaking fluency