Designing for Creative Research in Graduate Education

ABSTRACT

Developing competence with creativity is critical to graduate students’ training but often unaddressed in graduate education in a formal way. Creativity is an important 21st Century skill, and so there is a need to share the experiences of designing courses and training programs in creativity to support others’ future endeavors. An instructional team consisting of a design expert, two educators, a social scientist, and a scientist/humanist used research-based best practices from literature on design thinking, creative thinking, and teaching to train approximately 30 graduate students over a four-year period.

The team designed, taught, and iterated two courses: one surveying team-based creativity principles and practices and the other focusing on enhancing the creativity of an individual research project.