Fostering creativity in engineering undergraduates.
Date
2012-02-27
Authors
Pitso, Teboho
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Abstract
Since their establishment in the 1960s, Universities of Technology in South Africa have
been taking pride in providing career-focused qualifications that match the intermediate
needs of the economy. In order to provide these career-focused qualifications, these
institutions have been focusing on enacting a curriculum framework that emphasizes
replication of industrial processes which tended to accentuate routinized, conventional
problem-solving. The shift in economic paradigm in the 21st Century and the general
dissatisfaction with graduate readiness in the workplace as evident in both local and
international literature, framed as employability skills or generic skills, suggest a new
impetus being placed on creativity, especially in engineering education. This study
attempted to develop final-year undergraduates’ creativity through making visible the
key features of a pedagogic practice, by analyzing the existing engineering
undergraduate pedagogic practices, and reconceptualizing and testing a pedagogy that
could potentially develop undergraduates’ creativity. The reconceptualized pedagogy,
enacted as “learnshops”, accentuated teamwork, collaborative inquiry, guided creative
problem-solving and the use of case studies to encourage students to seek the higher
designs of water, paper and energy technologies within their institution. Design-Based
Research (DBR) frames the methodology and methods of data collection and analysis.
The research results show that existing engineering undergraduate pedagogic practices
remain trapped in the skills training discourse that emphasizes conventional problemsolving
in curriculum enactment. Students’ meanings of creativity remain generally
eclectic prior and post involvement in the learnshops, although students’ creativity
conceptions become more focused on imagination and resourcefulness postlearnshops.
The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) scores show that students’
creativity increased as a result of exposure to learnshops. Students working in teams of
intermediate size to creatively solve given open-ended tasks related to sustainable
development were able to achieve cooperation and generate useful ideas with the help
of pedagogic interventions implemented during the learnshops. Itinerant membership as
an aspect of team formation has little effect on teams’ generation of ideas.
Description
Keywords
Creativity, Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learnshops, Teamwork, DBR