Creative Pedagogy in an Undergraduate Creative Design Course: Discussions around Instructor Interviews

Creative thinking in design is a focus of PK-12 technology and engineering education. Pre-service STEM teachers from The College of New Jersey in the United States of America are required to take a course, Creative Design, as an integral part of their degree sequence. Additionally, Creative Design is a liberal learning course which fulfills a Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts requirement, and is therefore open to all students. The course is extremely popular, with approximately nine sections running each semester. Originally conceived in the 1960’s, topics covered in Creative Design include the design process, design thinking, technical drawing, design elements and principles, and human factors engineering (ergonomics). This study adopted a qualitative research design to explore if and how instructors of Creative Design employ creative pedagogy. The research question driving this inquiry was; how and in what ways are instructors of Creative Design using creative pedagogy in their classrooms? Four Creative Design instructors from The College of New Jersey were interviewed for this study. Open-ended questions allowed for deeper exploration of participants’ views and opinions. Thematic analysis was used to generate themes and gain a holistic understanding of participants’ use of creative pedagogy. Themes emerged such as open-ended problems, collaboration, and creative self-efficacy that were well aligned with research-based practices in design education