Teacher humor in the classroom: A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature

Abstract

Teacher humor, as well as humor in teaching in general, serves as an important pedagogical resource that contributes to creating a stimulating classroom atmosphere, facilitates communication and enhances students' learning processes. This paper aims to analyze contemporary scientific trends in research on teacher humor in the classroom, with a particular focus on the analysis of bibliographic unit networks. The study is based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications. The study was conducted on a sample of 421 scientific articles examining teacher humor in the context of classroom instructional processes. The data were analyzed using the software VOSviewer 1.6.20, with the aim of constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks, as well as identifying research directions in the field of teacher humor studies. The findings indicate a growing presence of this subject in the scientific literature over the past two decades. Moreover, the analysis highlights the existence of distinct clusters of key terms appearing in the bibliographic units, their interconnections, as well as the most represented research areas focusing on teacher humor in the classroom. The most productive authors and scientific journals in this research domain were also identified. The obtained results may be valuable to researchers in the academic community, serve as a foundation for future studies and provide guidance to scholars on this relatively underexplored subject. The study offers support in collecting adequate primary and secondary sources, relevant and systematically organized information and a basis for theoretical elaboration upon which methodological frameworks can be developed.