Teachers’ conceptions of student creativity in higher education

Abstract

Creativity is one of the important skills of the twenty-first century and central to higher education (HE). When we look closer into research on creativity in HE, however, it is not clear how university teachers conceptualise student creativity. How do teachers grasp, observe and express student creativity? Different methods such as interviews and online questionnaire have been used in this study. From the teacher perspective, student creativity is categorised into a 6-Facet-Model, in which teachers ‘see’ student creativity expressed through (1) student self-reflections, (2) independent decisions, (3) through curiosity and motivation, (4) producing something, (5) multi-perspectives and (6) when students develop original new ideas. The results provide a new understanding of student creativity from university teachers’ perspective that is useful for re-organising course designs.

Keywords:

• Creativity
• higher education
• data-grounded framework
• empirical study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Funded by the German Ministry of Education, BMBF, 2008–2011, ‘DaVinci – Fostering Creativity in HE’.