Creative students need creative teachers: Fostering the creativity of university teachers: A blind spot in higher engineering education?

Abstract

Fostering students' creativity is one indicator for good teaching and learning in higher engineering education. Recently, several approaches for fostering creativity in higher engineering education have been developed. In Germany and other countries, innovative learning and teaching concepts that allow students to unfold their creativity have been put into practice. However, further education trainings for teachers in higher education have shown: university teachers' creativity lacks a courageous attitude to change their teaching in order to foster students' creativity. In this paper, the connection between creativity and courage is presented and used to analyse the experiences that have been made with the task “do something unusual” in further education trainings. As a result in can be statet that students mainly fulfill the task “do something unusial” appropriately, while teachers mainly show strategies of pseudo-solving. The reasons for resitance and avoidance seem unclear, yet. Nevertheless, the implementation of innovative learning scenarios is a creative process itself, and teachers' courage has to be promoted in order to overcome fears that emerge in creative situations.