Exploring and Progressing the Concept of Joyful Teaching in Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the concept of joyful teaching in higher education and discusses common themes associated with it, as well as presents challenges. It is this concept of joyful teaching that we believe should be discussed and explored in greater detail, especially as it is an emerging concept with decolonizing pedagogies. This study uses 29 qualitative interviews with university faculty to examine the following question: How do university faculty define and practice joyful teaching in higher education? Our paper arises from a study focusing on decolonizing teaching praxis at a Canadian, prairie university, in which the focus of ‘joyful teaching’ arose as a major point of discussion. Our study suggests that restructuring teaching practices around joy can lead to more supportive, creative, and human-centred classrooms. We believe it is critical for higher education to place an emphasis on joyful teaching to promote not only joy but also self-growth for university teachers and students in post-secondary educational institutions. Keywords: teaching, joy, playful, belonging, decolonization
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".