Student Persistence Through Uncertainty Toward Successful Creative Practice

To increase creative practice among students in engineering and other disciplines, an interdisciplinary instructor team developed a cross-college undergraduate course aimed at open ideation and creative inquiry. One skill in the development of creative practice is identifying and addressing uncertainty avoidance behaviors, which are high in engineering students. We leverage research grounded in professional identity and cognitive design processes to study impacts of curriculum designed to address student persistence through, or indifference toward, uncertainty in creative practice. Questions we seek to explore are: What role does uncertainty avoidance play in developing creative practice, especially in interdisciplinary teams? What strategies can be used to overcome that uncertainty? To explore the role of uncertainty avoidance in the course, we analyze observational data of classroom activities, including ideation workshops, public critiques, team discussions, and artifacts of student work. Findings are used to draw conclusions about processes that are teachable in engineering and interdisciplinary learning environments, in terms of uncertainty avoidance and creativity. To this end, we offer initial directions and questions for future work that would contribute to a pedagogical model that helps engineering students succeed in interdisciplinary contexts. Introduction and Background In cross-cultural psychology, uncertainty avoidance is a construct that is based on how an individual responds to uncertainty and ambiguity. For example, instruments such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions survey measure tolerance for uncertainty at the societal level, indicating how members of a society either embrace or attempt to minimize uncertainty. Importantly, uncertainty and risk are distinct concepts: risk can be defined while uncertainty cannot. That is, “risk tolerance” involves gauging variables and probabilities and adjusting decision-making accordingly; managing uncertainty, on the other hand, involves the discomfort of working with “unknowns” and is a skill that can support critical and creative thinking. For example, the concept of design thinking intentionally incorporates uncertainty in the creative process: The uncertainty of design is both the frustration and the joy that designers get from their activity: they have learned to live with the fact that design proposals may remain ambiguous and uncertain until quite late in the process. Designers will generate early tentative solutions, but also leave many options open for as long as possible; they are prepared to regard solution concepts as temporarily imprecise and often inconclusive. p. 12 In undergraduate course settings that incorporate uncertainty, students face a number of challenges, and they often try to perform in ways that satisfy traditional learning contexts governed by well-designed problems and grade-driven incentives. Like most undergraduates, engineering students often have expectations from learning in their home discipline, in which “the most commonly encountered problems are well-structured with known, correct solutions” p. 38, . In building teaching and learning environments for improving creative practice, we seek to incorporate strategies to address uncertainty by immersing students in a design thinking environment. Our strategies emphasize reflective practice in which not only are problems complex and ill-structured, but emphasis is placed on both problem-solving and on problem framing. This entails an iterative process of sustaining multiple possibilities and dealing with the necessity to “pivot”, and the value shifts to problem shaping: “Identifying, framing, and reframing the problem to be solved are as important in this process as solving the problem or finding an appropriate solution” p. . In our cross-college undergraduate course aimed at open ideation and creative inquiry, we work with student groups that include engineering, science, design, and humanities majors. To increase creative practice, we focus on identifying and addressing uncertainty avoidance behaviors, which are often high in engineering students, and using design thinking strategies to support students’ ability to continue working throughout the loosely structured curriculum. In these settings, it is critical to provide students with the permission they need to explore ambiguous spaces, and to offer support and guidance on how to overcome perceived failure. As instructors in our own interdisciplinary team, we used an auto-ethnographic practice to examine our own “attitudes and dispositions” in an effort to remain sensitive, open-minded, and tolerant of a certain level of ambiguity in how we structured and supported the class p. 9, 10, p. . Through transparent modeling by instructors, the students received the permission they needed to question, struggle, fail, and regroup numerous times, which contributed to multiple levels of behaviors related to uncertainty avoidance. Throughout the design and implementation of the course, we used our observations as recorded in the auto-ethnography and embedded assessment tools such as student reflections and group activities to both enact and study student persistence through uncertainty in creative practice. This paper reports on our initial findings in addressing the following research questions: ● What role does uncertainty avoidance play in developing creative practice especially in interdisciplinary teams? ● What strategies can be used to overcome that uncertainty?