Humor in library instruction: a narrative review with implications for the health sciences

Abstract

Objective: The review sought to gain a better understanding of humor’s use and impact as a teaching and learning strategy in academic library and health sciences instruction and to determine if the most common techniques across both disciplines can be adapted to increase engagement in medical libraries’ information literacy efforts.Methods: This narrative review involved retrieving citations from several subject databases, including Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts; Information Science & Technology Abstracts; Library & Information Science Source; PubMed; and CINAHL. The author limited her review to those publications that explicitly addressed the use of humor in relation to some form of academic library or health sciences instruction. Studies examining use of humor in patient education were excluded.Results: Scholars and practitioners have consistently written about humor as an instructional strategy from the 1980s onward, in both the library literature and health sciences literature. These authors have focused on instructors’ attitudes, benefits to students, anecdotes, and best practices summaries. Overall, both librarians and health sciences educators have a positive opinion of humor, and many instructors make use of it in their classrooms, though caution and careful planning is advised.Conclusions: Commonalities between the library and information science literature and health sciences literature provide a cohesive set of best practices and strategies for successfully incorporating comedy into library instruction sessions. Health sciences librarians can adapt several of the most commonly used types of instructional humor (e.g., silly examples, cartoons, storytelling, etc.) to their own contexts with minimal risk.

Interplay of occupational stress, sense of humor, and health status among nurses working at hospitals in Ahvaz

“…The Iranian Sense of Humor Questionnaire (SHQ): this tool was developed by researchers from Iran by reviewing Iranian articles [ 26 , 27 ]. The questionnaire contains 30 items and four parameters of humor: a) attitude, b) creativity, c) perceptivity, and d) tendency.…”

Teaching strategies for library instruction: directions from the literature

“…The learning strategy goes with the cognitive approach such as dividing learning material into small portions (chunking), promote repletion to build certain thoughts, and explaining in detail with the intention of increasing memory and understanding. Several strategies that related to cognitive skills in library instruction include conducting online discussions (Tewell 2018;Budai and Williams 2021), critical library instruction (Whitver and Lo 2017;Tewell 2018;Azadbakht, 2019;Tomaszweski 2021), and cognitive apprenticeship (Tomkins 2016;Oberlies, Buxton and Karpinski 2020).…”

“…Learning directly in front of the teacher face-to-face is essential because being stunned must always be supervised and controlled. Many say that pedagogy in libraries is different from formal education in universities; therefore, learning in libraries should also be made a little informal and more caring, and many activities should be learned by doing or through mistakes (Bicknell-Holmes and Hoffman 2000), using much humor and comedy (Walker 2006;Azadbakht 2019). Humor makes the class relaxed, and students are not tense, making it easier to receive the material.…”

Information Literacy: Making Asynchronous Learning More Effective With Best Practices That Include Humor

“…The use of humor in teaching has been identified as another way to reduce stress and anxiety, both in library classes (Agius & Levey, 2019;Azadbakht, 2019) and in non-library classes (Acevedo, 2020;Ryoo, 2019;Schriek, 2018). Humor can also be used to stimulate creativity, make it easier to remember what is being learned (Azadbakht, 2019;Ryoo, 2019), and help make the instructor appear more approachable (Ryoo, 2019). In addition to recommending guidelines for the use of humor, Agius and Levey (2019) and Ryoo (2019) cautioned against using aggressive or self-defeating humor.…”