Summary:
What is the role of
humor?
- To create a memorable moment
- To foster a creative collaborative environment
- "contextually rich learning"
- Attention
- Encoding
- Emotion: emotion drives attention and attention drives learning-Robert sylwester.
Why do we use
stories? (Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002)
- To convey or make meaning
- As a cultural communication tool
- To affirm commonalities or make distinctions
- To create memories
- To frame interpretations
- To understand
- To support arguments
- To facilitate vicarious interactions
- To facilitate authentic exploration
What is a story?
(common elements)
- Context and characters
- Beginning, middle, end
- Conflict, climax, resolution
- Types:
- The springboard: what you can get learners from here to there; "I did this and you can, too" story.
- The exemplary situation: "the best way to do it" story
- The cautionary tale: don't do this, or something terrible will happen
- The turning point: we were doing this and we change our direction, and this happened as result.
- The historical account: part of what happened in the history
- The news item
- The allegory/ parable/ fable/ myth
What is a case?
- A story with a targeted learning or assessment purpose
- Sometimes called a scenario or a case-scenario
When do we use a
case?
- To illustrate a pathway or best practice: learner reflects, discusses meaning
- As source for learner response, application of knowledge (formative assessment)
- To reveal gaps in learner knowledge: learner provides response, reflects, experiences, collaborative interactions, discusses meaning
- As summative assessment tool: learner provides response, is scored according to established criteria
Developing the Case
- Context and characters
- Challenge
- Timeline
- [the response]
- [results]
Decision points
- Introduction
- Presentation of content
- Practice
- Feedback
- Assessment
- Feedback
- Conclusion
A word of caution
- It is important to understand the range of cultural considerations
- Humor rarely translates between cultures and languages
- Don’t' essentialize: don't use characters or storylines that will deepen the negative impression/ perception on a certain group of people. Ex, use a Hispanic person as a criminal character.
Reflection:
Storytelling is an important element in teaching. Dr. G and Dr. L's screenshots together provides a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical principles and practical application of this element. On top of Dr. G's elaboration on case development, I think if we would like to use case analysis as a summative assessment, we should plan out the evaluation criteria first, and then develop the case based on the evaluation criteria. This shall ensure the case story includes all that should be evaluated.
The RSS story video in Dr. L's screenshot not only is interesting but also happens to be our project content. We might include this video in our project. "The open textbooks explained example" is an awesome idea for developing storytelling video when we lack the skills of using computer software to design graphics or animations.
Finally, in terms of humor and essentializing, it is true that humor doesn't translate between languages and cultures. For example, Americans like to show humor through sarcasm, which is something doesn't exist in Asian cultures. Using sarcasm as a way of humor may only make students of other cultures feel bad about themselves because they do not feel engaged in the situation and sometimes they even need someone else to explain to them why it is funny. It is also true that we should not use characters or story lines that will deepen the negative impression/ perception on a certain group of people. What is ironic is, I did not learn any of the negative perceptions until I started my studies in the US and people kept "EMPHASIZING" that we should NOT EMPHASIZING these negative perceptions and then explain what negative perceptions exists currently. If they did not tell me those existing ideologies, I may not even develop those perceptions. What makes the situation even more complicated is that, obviously, if you don't know these ideologies and act upon them, people recognize you as a foreigner, an outsider of this society. So what now?
Humor is so difficult to convey across cultures. One of the forms of humor the Comedy Group wanted to use a lot last year were puns, or plays on words. We had to explain what the joke was to two of our four members a few times to go through, but it was also a very grounding experience. It made us think about the jokes we were including in our presentation and project because everyone came from different backgrounds. Our unspoken rule became "if it's not funny after it gets explained, it's not funny enough to include as an example of humor."
ReplyDeleteWe actually listed sarcasm as a form of negative humor. Since our project was based around young children, we were dividing humor into "safe" humor - which was humor that didn't hurt anyone physically or emotionally - and negative humor, which could be hurtful. We felt that sarcasm was usually used to point out the negative side of a situation, or indirectly poke fun at someone else, so it was listed as highly negative humor, with very little "safe" instances.
I like the points you bring up in your post, though, it makes me remember we had those difficulties with our last project so we know to watch for them again.