“In Humour We Trust”
We are a group of dedicated educators in higher education who firmly believe that:
(1) Learning should be fun and enjoyable for everyone.
(2) Appropriate use of humour in teaching can boost students’ motivation, thereby enhancing their learning experience and academic performance.
(3) Humour can foster greater student engagement, contributing to stronger teacher-student rapport.
(4) Humour can help reduce students’ stress and cultivate a more relaxed, supportive learning environment.
To ensure that we consistently use humour in effective, appropriate, and purposeful ways, we have collectively adopted the Planned Humour Incorporation System for Teaching and Learning Enhancement (PHISTLE). This system supports the strategic use of humour—its types, methods, and frequency—to achieve positive learning outcomes across disciplines.
In addition to applying PHISTLE in our own teaching, we are committed to sharing our practices with the wider teaching community. To this end, we established the Humour-Enhanced Teaching and Learning Community of Practice (HETL-CoP), a platform for members to connect, exchange resources, co-develop ideas, and collaborate on projects.
The Story of How It Began
When I flunked my first-year university biology course in 1999, I faced an internal struggle. Deep down, I knew the failure was mostly my fault, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the professor shared some of the blame. I had always been interested in biology and had done well in it during high school, which led me to declare biochemistry as my major in my first year. Yet all I could remember about that course was the crushing boredom. Every lecture, the professor would photocopy textbook pages onto transparencies, project them on the big screen, and read them out line by line. I could barely keep my eyes open against the grandeur of what I called “The Great Wall of Text”. Its holy light was blinding. His deep, monotonous, God-like voice was divine and oh-so-peaceful. Resistance was futile. Within a minute of each class starting, my soul had already left my body. It was, in retrospect, a truly surreal experience. Little did I know then that, two decades later, I would be teaching biochemistry myself, and even less did I realise that a seed had been planted deep in my heart by that very experience…
Fast-forward 20 years: I was a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, assigned to teach biochemistry. As I reviewed the text-heavy and molecular pathway-heavy contents that I was about to teach, I had vivid flashbacks of my “surreal biology” class. I told myself, “No, I can’t let this happen… If I find it torturing to teach this, it’d be even more torturing for my students to learn this from me. I’m not a masochist, nor am I a sadist! If I’m going to teach this, I will have to make it more enjoyable for everyone, including myself!” That was the pivotal moment when I picked up the “sword of planned humour” and began my life-long crusade for the “holy grail of fun” in the classroom.
Classes that are exciting and engaging classes have the power to attract students into a particular field of study. Some of them may be future geniuses who could one day transform that field forever… We simply never know! On the contrary, dull, uninspiring classes can turn even the most curious students away for good. If a potential genius is driven out of a discipline due to a teacher’s boring lectures, the consequences could ripple across decades. Thus, never underestimate the destructive power of a boring class! After all, we don’t know who the next Einstein might be. Albert Einstein himself was rumoured to be a poor student in his early years. Sir John Gurdon, Nobel Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society, was once told by his high school teacher that he was “hopeless” in pursuing science as a career. Failure didn’t drive these geniuses away from what they did, but boredom might have just done the trick and become their undoing! Thank God that they didn’t find their studies to be boring!
As teachers, we are not just knowledge transmitters. We are also motivators, inspirers, entertainers, and discovery tour guides of our students. We are responsible for our students’ learning journey. We have the choice and the privilege to make that a fun and enjoyable journey, which may change their courses of life and enable them to change the world someday.
Alex C. Koon, PhD, FHEA
Senior Lecturer,
School of Life Sciences,
Faculty of Science,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
