Laughter in the Writing Center: Creating Intimate Rhetorical Experiences in the Writing Center to Engage the Learning Process

Laughter in the Writing Center: Creating Intimate Rhetorical Experiences in the Writing Center to Engage the Learning Process

by Kimberly A. Bain

What Laughter Can Do

Finding ways to engage in the ecology of the learning experience that occurs in the writing center is crucial to the students’ sense of learning development. Considering laughter’s impact on students' engagement goes beyond simply making jokes or having preconceived notions of immaturity or silliness that society tends to associate with laughter. Sarah Ahmed considers the affect that is involved when happiness is used as “...involving affect (to be happy is to be affected by something), intentionality (to be happy is to be happy about something), and evaluation or judgment (to be happy about something makes something good)” (30). Finding opportunities to develop empathy through the shared affect of laughter can allow students to mitigate their fears and further help establish a connection in the tutoring session.

Establishing empathy encourages students to consider their competencies in writing and the work to mitigate the writing insecurities. Eric Leake argues that “[Empathy] often includes a move to perspective-taking so that one might be more aware of how the world looks and feels to somebody else with a different personal history and in a particular situation.” There can be limited opportunities to create a sense of intimacy that allows the student to feel empowered in their writing abilities within the tutoring session.  However, empathy can help develop a sense of shared understanding under time constraints of a tutoring session. 

Critical Awareness of Laughter

While laughter can be seen as a positive element in the tutoring experience, the question of when to implement laughter into tutoring sessions highlights the contextuality of language, which is a concept writing tutors often seek to reinforce. In the text Cultivating Language Awareness, Shawna Shaprio highlights the contextuality of language in understanding how discourse communities are formed through social, cultural, and contextual codes. Shapiro furthers that “Becoming ‘literate’ doesn’t just mean learning to replicate writing formats and formulas, it means engaging with academic cultures and conversations” (131). The conversations that students and tutors enter into during their sessions require an understanding of how both student and tutor relate to each other in an academic context.

Tutors must also be mindful of the ways in which laughter can create a sense of inferiority or insecurity in the rhetorical situation of tutoring. Laughter is rhetorical. Stephen Sherwood cites John Locke who “...implies [that] wit is a mere ornament; at worst, it is an immoral instrument of deception” (45). A tutor must be careful about what and which context can be deemed justifiable for an instance of useful laughter. Sherwood furthers that “The needs and moods of members of the audience—their tolerance of humor and their willingness to participate in it—will often determine its effectiveness” (45). Tutors should not assume that laughter works in the same way for all students in all rhetorical situations. Students may also be wary of the deceptive element that laughter can provide when taken out of context. The last thing a tutor would want to do is to make the student feel as if they are being laughed at instead of laughed with for any of their writing concerns. 

Rather, tutors must be aware of the social and cultural nuances that create rhetorical situations for laughter. They must also be aware of students’ insecurities around laughter and its potential for deceptive rhetoric that can be used against the student to demoralize them. Students should not be prompted to make light of an academic concern nor should they be made to feel as though they are being belittled or taken advantage of in the tutoring session. Instead, they should be empowered through shared vulnerability for critical analysis and self-awareness.

Laughter as Persuasion

Tutoring consistently involves practices of persuasion. In order to convince students to adopt specific writing practices and to clarify suggestions and comments made by instructors, the writing tutor must be able to persuade. Kenneth Burke points out that “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55). Persuasion in the writing center doesn’t simply involve the production of correct points, but it involves the social contexts that provide students with confidence in the persuasive acts of the tutor to be able to follow their guidance. Engaging in the practices of rhetorical empathy through laughter can allow both students and tutors to understand the social and cultural contexts of shared vulnerability and the affective elements that shape the students’ rhetorical practices.

by Kimberly A. Bain