A Study on Creative Climate in Project-Organized Groups (POGs) in China and Implications for Sustainable Pedagogy

Chunfang Zhou

doi:10.3390/su10010114

Abstract

This paper aims to explore a research question: what are the drivers and barriers to fostering a creative climate in POGs in China and how to improve POGs towards a better sustainable pedagogy? Theoretically, this paper bridges studies on creativity, collaborative learning, creative climate, and sustainable pedagogy in one framework. Empirically, mixed methods of quantitative questionnaire survey (n = 126) and qualitative interviews (n = 15) were used to collect data. The findings demonstrate that the drivers to a creative climate include the challenge of the task, openness, trust between peers, experts’ help, and group diversity, etc. However, some group problems, such as poor management, lacking of supervision supports, and students’ fear of authority, etc., are barriers to a creative climate. This implies the needs of restructuring the relationships between teachers and students in POGs in order to improve it as a better sustainable pedagogy.

Highlights

Education for sustainability has been increasingly important at all levels of the educational system including higher education [1,2]
According to the results of the Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ) survey, an overall self-evaluation of a creative climate by students has been obtained, which can be indicated by the statistics of mean value for every factor in the CCQ (Table 2)
This paper takes an innovative, emerging pedagogy of project-organized groups (POGs) in Chinese universities as an example, to assess both the drivers and barriers of POGs to fostering a creative climate, in order to rethink how to improve POGs toward a better sustainable pedagogy. By using both questionnaire survey and interviews, this study unpacks the influences of POGs on a creative climate in collaborative learning settings

Summary

Introduction

Education for sustainability has been increasingly important at all levels of the educational system including higher education [1,2]. There has been a growing attention to develop sustainable pedagogies in diverse countries such as Australia [5,6], the United Kingdom [1,7], Spain [8], the Netherlands [9], and Sweden [10]. In this way, education for sustainability is underpinned by radically different ways of comprehending learning, teaching, and human interaction with the environment and each other that is understood by the ‘business as usual’ society in which we live. The sustainable pedagogies require teachers who should prepare for transformative education with the accompanying personal transformation required [5,6,11]

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion