Investigating How Early-Career Engineering Faculty Perceive the Role Creativity Should Play in Engineering Education

Creativity is critical to engineering. This study aimed to understand engineering faculty members' perceptions of creativity and its relationship with engineering, their teaching philosophies, how they perceived their own and their students' creativity, and how their teaching philosophies affected their beliefs of incorporating creativity into engineering education. To accomplish our goal, we interviewed ten engineering faculty members and conducted a thematic analysis. The results indicated that the faculty members loved teaching and sharing knowledge, that they inherited their teaching skills from their teachers, or they learned them from colleagues or training camps, and that they enjoyed interacting with students, using group collaboration to accomplish assignments, and appreciating the moment students demonstrated insight and knowledge. Faculty members perceived creativity as something new and beneficial to society; they felt there was or should be a strong relationship between creativity and engineering. Most of them believed that they, as faculty members, were creative and that their students were creative in different ways. Their major concerns about directly integrating creativity into their teaching included that the integration might be time-consuming, that the evaluation would be complex, and that they lacked the knowledge, facilities, resources, and soft skills necessary to perform the integration. Implications of these findings are discussed.