engleski

Humour in the world of students, students in the world of humour

Although humour and laughter were the objects of discussion and study in ancient times, influential research on humour and laughter started as late as towards the end of the nineteenth century, about the time when Henry Bergson, a notable French philosopher, published his book Le rire (1990). The twentieth century witnessed important developments in sciences and the humanities, which also contributed to the development of the studies of humour and laughter. Freud published his work Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten in 1905, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens appeared in 1938, Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World in 1965, André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir’ appeared in 1940, Propp’s On the Comic and Laughter was published posthumously in 1976 … A striking number of works by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, philosophers, literary critics and other researchers have appeared since the beginning of the twentieth century, elucidating laughter and humour from various angles ( Mc Ghee 1979 ; Holland 1982 ; Raskin 1985 ; Attardo 1994 ; Dynel 2013). Humour has also been widely researched within the context of education, since education is one of the focal points in human life. According to Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez and Liu (2011), humour in educational settings has been researched for over four decades. In Croatia, several authors have investigated that area, out of whom Matijević (1994) might be the most influential. Our paper is based on the research which is still in progress, where we are investigating attitudes of university students – future primary school teachers – towards humour. We wanted to establish whether they find humour to be positive or negative, and whether they find it to be important in people's lives. Furthermore, we questioned the students' attitudes regarding humour in the educational context, asking them about their past experience and their possible future teaching styles. We also asked the students about their knowledge of humour types, as well as their preferences. What also interested us was to see whether their tastes regarding humour had changed over time. The participants in our study were 100 students at a university in Croatia, who are training to be primary school teachers. The instrument was a questionnaire containing fourteen questions. We expect the answers to reflect positive attitudes both to humour in general and to humour in an educational setting. Nevertheless, we also expect to encounter negative attitudes, possibly caused by some negative experience, or by conservative attitudes of a particular student. The aim of the research was to obtain data that might shed some light on the ideas and attitudes of young people who will soon be educators themselves, and to raise their own awareness about humour as part of human lives, and as part of human communication.

humour, human communication, students, future teachers

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