Integrating Creative Thinking Skills into the Higher Education Classroom

The Torrance Incubation Model (TIM) provides a simple and highly effective mechanism for integrating creativity into the teaching of any subject. The model provides guidelines for educators who wish to develop their students' creative skills, but struggle to find the space in the curriculum in which to teach creativity as a subject. The TIM allows creativity to be woven into lesson plans by deliberately incorporating one, or more, of the core creativity skills identified by Torrance. This chapter explains the TIM, and provides examples of how it was used to redesign lessons in a higher education class, in order to teach both the subject, and at the same time develop the students' creative capabilities.

An Exploration of Darkness within Doctoral Education

In doctoral education, the formal structures include the Graduate School system, PhD courses, and supervision contracts, etc. Doctoral education also takes place on informal and tacit levels, where doctoral students learn about the institutional regulations, the research field, academic craftsmanship, and research design by observing how their supervisors talk, act, and handle issues in the professional community. However, the formal-informal divide is not adequate if we want to understand the sprawling, mongrel, and diverse forms of student engagement, coping, and learning strategies within doctoral education today. By drawing on the empirical studies of cross-level institutional voices, as well as international studies into similar grey areas of student learning in doctoral education, this chapter argues that learning spaces of educational ‘darkness' hold unrecognised potential for enhancing learning experiences, harnessing professional competences, and enriching the depth of research in the PhD life that implies significant contributions to future doctoral education development.

Fostering Creative Problem Solvers in Higher Education

Recent studies have emphasized issues of social emergence based on thinking of societies as complex systems. The complexity of professional practice has been recognized as the root of challenges for higher education. To foster creative problem solvers is a key response of higher education in order to meet such challenges. This chapter aims to illustrate how to understand: 1) complexity as the nature of professional practice; 2) creative problem solving as the core skill in professional practice; 3) creativity as interplay between persons and their environment; 4) higher education as the context of fostering creative problem solvers; and 5) some innovative strategies such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and building a learning environment by Information Communication Technology (ICT) as potential strategies of creativity development. Accordingly, this chapter contributes to bridge the complexity of societies, creative problem solving skills, and higher education development in one theoretical framework.

Distributed Problem-Solving

This chapter aims to deconstruct some persistent myths about creativity: the myth of individualism and of the genius. By looking at literature that approaches creativity as a participatory and distributed phenomenon and by bringing empirical evidence from artists' studios, the author presents a perspective that is relevant to higher education. The focus here is on how artists solve problems in distributed paths, and on the elements of creative collaboration. Creative problem-solving will be looked at as an ongoing dialogue that artists engage with themselves, with others, with recipients and with materials, in asynchronous or synchronous relationships. The empirical background draws on qualitative narratives collected in 2011-2014 and based on interviews with recognized artists. The questions guiding the present chapter are: If creativity does not arise from talent but from exercise and hard work, what can educators at higher education learn from the ways creative groups solve problems? How can artists contribute to inspiring higher education?

Applying Blooms Digital Taxonomy to Address Creativity and Second Order Digital Divide in Internet Skills

Internet technologies play a significant role to enhance creativity of the students in learning environments. Internet literacy is vital to effectively use the Internet tools to enhance creative learning environments. In the developing countries Internet literacy is still an unfulfilled dream for students coming from underprivileged backgrounds thus bringing a digital divide in skills. The chapter draws upon an empirical study done in India on how an intervention comprised of Internet training designed on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and action research workshops based on the learning domains of the digital taxonomy was an effective approach for empowering women students through learning to use the Internet. The chapter puts forward the argument that an intervention for learning to use the Internet can be effective where focus is on the reflective and conceptual skills in using the Internet than focusing too much on the content that is dynamic.

Enhancing Students' Critical Thinking through Portfolios

Portfolios can serve a crucial role in helping students develop their critical thinking in writing, thereby promoting write-to-learn philosophy in education. Still, not any portfolio's content and approach can guarantee the achievement of this goal. Teachers' concern in promoting students' critical thinking needs to be reflected in their decision that is related to the evidences of students' needs that helps to select their approaches of integrating and using them into class. Students' reflection needs to underpin all stages of portfolio assessment through providing opportunities for their decision-making, initiation and creativity. Therefore, this chapter puts forward a student portfolio model along with its content and process of use. This learning tool was integrated within the course of Written Expression and used by 33 students at the Department of English at Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University during the academic year 2013-2014. Recommendations are also provided in order to make it a vehicle for critical thinking.

Problem Solving at the Edge of Disciplines

This chapter outlines a new perspective on disciplinary collaboration that draws inspiration from ecology that observes that the edges where ecosystems meet tend to have greater biodiversity than the ecosystems themselves. This thinking is applied to a typical University Faculty consisting of three Schools to show that the potential for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries is rich. The chapter proposes a new degree structure that embeds problem solving skills as core to the production of “pi-shaped” people, defined as those that have disciplinary depth in two areas and the ability to work outside of their core area. In this regard, problem solving is consider an area where a student can achieve depth of knowledge. The degree is designed such that it produces an exchange of students across disciplinary boundaries and also structured so that it takes students on a journey through different models of disciplinary collaboration. The degree is seen as a key enabled of achieving so called “Mode 2” knowledge production.

International Center for Studies in Creativity

This chapter provides an overview of the programs offered by the International Center for Studies in Creativity (ICSC) at Buffalo State, State University of New York, where creativity is taught and studied extensively at the graduate and undergraduate level. Following the discussion on creativity as a 21st century skill and perennial need for creativity in the workforce, programs and courses are introduced along with the historical roots and philosophy of creativity at ICSC. The Creative Problem Solving Model, which represents the core of the curriculum, is described. The chapter also presents the results of the study regarding the impact of the graduate program on the creative problem solving attitudes of the graduate students based on qualitative and quantitative data.

Creativity Development through Inquiry-Based Learning in Biomedical Sciences

The increasing complexity of biomedical research has led to new models for collaborative research at large scale. Big science projects require multidisciplinary teams and skills, such as creativity, to foster innovation. Higher education can play an important role in fostering creativity with active-learning strategies, such as the Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) approach. In this chapter, we explain how the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, used IBL to bring medicine and human biology students together to find creative solutions to solve a challenging problem in biomedicine. In this interprofessional experience, students were taught creative techniques in a creativity workshop. The positive results, which were highlighted by external evaluators for their high quality, demonstrate the value of these collaborative projects in encouraging creativity. We propose that integrating the IBL pedagogical methodology with creative techniques and interprofessionalism is a valuable approach for fostering students' creativity and generative and research skills.

A Creativity and Innovation Course for Engineers

In this chapter, the teaching methodologies and pedagogical styles adopted within the “Creativity and Innovation”course, offered at the University of Bologna in Italy are described. The main goal of the course is to give students both a theoretical foundation and a hands-on experience about meta-cognitive strategies for the control of the creative thinking process. The students were engaged in the selection of a focus area within the range promoted by a call for new start-ups, creating the playground for team-oriented sessions in which relevant information was collected, divergent modifiers were applied, ideas were generated, business models were sketched and assessed, and finally concluding the course with a team presentation of the generated ideas. The feedback received from the engineering students was very positive. While the ideational part of the class followed a learning-by-doing approach, this was preceded by a specific theoretical part, striking an effective balance between theory and practice.