Understanding humour as an indicator of teachers’ professional deformation
This article is dedicated to the relationship between teachers’ professional deformation and their understanding of humour. Teachers working at secondary schools in St Petersburg and the Leningrad Region took part in the study. The study analysed teachers’ humour styles, professional deformation and emotional burnout. The research hypothesis was that teachers’ burnout level influences their understanding of humour and preferred humour style. The following methods were used in the study: express tool for emotional burnout assessment in teachers by O. L. Goncharova, R. Martin’s Humour Styles Questionnaire and the author’s “Jokes” method designed to determine degrees of various professional deformation aspects in teachers. Student’s T-test for independent samples and Pearson’s correlation coefficient were used for mathematical and statistical testing. The results show that the use of humour in education helps teachers to cope with daily stress and increases their adaptability to the educational environment. Types of humour used by teachers can indicate the degree of their professional deformation. Older teachers with a high level of emotional burnout try to avoid situations where they become the object of other people’s jokes. This humour style is more characteristic of younger teachers. For teachers with high burnout levels, a self-supporting humour style counteracts authoritarianism in the professional environment. An optimistic outlook allows teachers to find funny things in situations that involve professional deformation. Younger teachers with fewer years of experience and low emotional burnout level tend to use an aggressive humour style at work. Teachers in the first and second groups consider jokes about “feelings of exhaustion and chronic fatigue” and “role behaviour transfer” as the funniest, which may indicate a tendency to find funny things in signs of professional deformation affecting the teacher’s quality of life.