In April 2022 we finally started our “Learning Out Loud” -LOL project.

The Project is co-funded by The Erasmus + program, and involves five international organisations: 

• EBB Europass Berlin Beratungsbüro GmbH 🇩🇪
• Europass Teacher Academy 🇮🇹
• Europass Academy of Creativity 🇪🇸
• Teacher Academy Ireland 🇮🇪
• Viceversa 🇨🇿

The project aims at producing quality training materials for teachers and trainers, who want to bring more fun and engagement in class!

In May we started working on the first Intellectual Output of the project: a series of MOOCs about humour, comedy and stand-up comedy, with some tips on how to bring these elements in class when teaching.

Carmine Rodi, our humour and comedy expert organised for us a very funny, engaging and interesting live-online training, where we had the opportunity to challenge ourselves, discovering our comedian talent.

During our 4 meetings we discussed a lot: what is funny? Do we have taboos? How can we establish a connection with the audience? And how can we use humour in class with students?

Indeed, many interesting points came out; We all have a personal ideas of what is funny and what is not, and these are strictly bound to our identity. The same happens with taboos: due to our background, we all have topics we can’t really address in a funny way. For example, one can feel uncomfortable with jokes about sex and gender while another person may feel at their ease even sharing personal episodes on the topic.

It also came out that the best way to connect with an audience is to address in a funny way something personal; they will feel more at ease knowing that they share something with the speaker. 

The workshops haven’t been only about theory, but we also practised a lot with very funny and sometimes challenging exercises, such as always answering “yes”, or always “no” to a partner trying to recall a former episode, or holding a political speech in front of an audience always questioning everything.

Moreover, we had the opportunity to meet two professional stand -up comedians and to enjoy their performances. We had then the chance to ask them about their techniques, their performances and also to ask them for some advices on how to interact with the audience and build jokes.

Here the opinion of one of the training attendees, Gabriele: 

“I was impressed how the training was fun and interesting to follow! I am usually not a big fan of Online meetings, but this time I appreciated a lot how Carmine prioritised the connection with us and developed the content according to our questions and discussion. “

Gabriele Cinti, Trainer by Europass Berlin