Fostering creativity in engineering undergraduates.

Pitso, Teboho

Fostering creativity in engineering undergraduates.

dc.contributor.author	Pitso, Teboho
dc.date.accessioned	2012-02-27T10:29:33Z
dc.date.available	2012-02-27T10:29:33Z
dc.date.issued	2012-02-27
dc.description.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.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10539/11355
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.subject	Creativity	en_US
dc.subject	Curriculum	en_US
dc.subject	Pedagogy	en_US
dc.subject	Learnshops	en_US
dc.subject	Teamwork	en_US
dc.subject	DBR	en_US
dc.title	Fostering creativity in engineering undergraduates.	en_US
dc.type	Thesis	en_US