Theatre-based techniques for enhancing creativity in engineering education: An evaluation study of the creativity academy program

In response to the underemphasis on creativity in college engineering education and the limited knowledge and skills of early-career engineering faculty to nurture students’ creativity, the Creativity Academy was designed as a faculty development program. Using theatre-based approaches, the program aimed to train early-career engineering faculty members to incorporate creativity into their classrooms. Two research questions were addressed: how faculty incorporate creativity after participating in the Creativity Academy and how students perceive faculty integration of creativity into their classes. Interviews were conducted with ten early-career engineering faculty members who participated in the training, as well as focus group interviews with each faculty participant’s students. Results indicated that faculty participants mastered at least two creativity-fostering exercises to apply in their teaching, revised their syllabi, and incorporated these exercises to engage students and develop their creativity. Students confirmed the changes in their professors’ teaching practices and expressed excitement. The study concludes that providing more opportunities for engineering students to develop creativity is essential, and the implications of the findings are discussed with suggestions for future Creativity Academy programs.


Introduction
Engineering constantly endeavors to transform ideas into reality through innovative methods and solutions [1].As creativity is defined as the mental capacity for generating novel ideas, techniques, or solutions [2], it is an essential component in engineering.This importance is widely acknowledged in the field [3], highlighting the necessity for more creative engineers.Consequently, emphasizing creativity should be a priority in the education of future engineers.Despite its significance, several researchers have observed a lack of focus on creativity in engineering education.For instance, Daly and colleagues [4] discovered that the current engineering curriculum falls short of fostering creative idea generation.Similarly, Cropley [1] argued that the development of creativity is often neglected in higher education.This issue is further emphasized by Kazerounian and Foley [5], who identified that engineering courses fail to address nine out of their "Ten Maxims of Creativity in Education."This concerning discrepancy between the demands of the engineering profession and the education provided calls for a reassessment of the curriculum to better incorporate creativity.
press.Building upon this framework, Batey [19] introduced a three-dimensional model to characterize creativity, which includes the level dimension (comprising individual, team, organization, and culture), the facet dimension (encompassing trait, process, press, and product), and the measurement approach dimension (consisting of objective, self-rating, and other-ratings).Batey's model serves to describe creativity on a macro scale; however, each dimension and its contributing factors may necessitate more specific assessment methods or tools for measurement purposes.Meanwhile, Badran [20] examined creativity from both personal and community perspectives.According to Badran, the personal level of creativity encompasses intelligence, knowledge, thinking, personality, imagination, motivation, and environment.On the other hand, the community level consists of four components: (1) engineering creativity, (2) technical and practical creativity and skillfulness, (3) small and medium enterprises, and (4) business creativity support.
When attempting to comprehend creativity, it is essential to consider two key concepts: divergent and convergent thinking.Divergent thinking refers to the process of generating multiple solutions to a problem [21].Often regarded as a significant indicator of creativity, divergent thinking stands in contrast to convergent thinking, which emphasizes generating a single, well-defined solution [22].One example of assessing an individual's divergent thinking capabilities is Guilford's [23] Uses test.This evaluation requires participants to identify as many possible uses for ordinary items, such as a brick, safety pin, or balloon.The greater the number of uses a participant can identify, the more divergent their thinking is considered to be.Researchers like Batey and colleagues [24] have employed this test to measure divergent thinking in their studies.In the context of engineering education, it is important to foster both divergent and convergent thinking among students.Encouraging divergent thinking allows students to explore various innovative solutions, while convergent thinking helps them refine and evaluate these ideas to determine the most effective and practical approach.By cultivating a balance between these two forms of thinking, educators can better prepare future engineers to address complex problems with creativity and critical analysis.
The majority of creativity and engineering researchers recognize the importance of creativity in engineering [3,[25][26][27].Creativity supplies ideas to engineering, while engineering serves as the platform to showcase these ideas [1].Both creativity and engineering share the common goal of generating novel and effective solutions or products [28].Considering the significance of creativity in engineering, it might be expected that it would also be emphasized in engineering education.However, the reality is often quite different [1].Kazerounian and Foley's [5] study supports this notion, as their engineering student participants reported that creativity was not valued in their classes and that their instructors failed to encourage creative thinking.In a similar vein, a 2010 survey [29] revealed that while over 80% of engineering department chairs were aware of innovative instructional methods, such as student-active pedagogies, interdisciplinary capstone projects, design projects in first-year engineering courses, and artifact dissection, fewer than 50% of their departments were actually implementing these techniques.This apparent lack of emphasis on creativity in engineering education underscores the critical need for a reevaluation and revision of current teaching practices in engineering courses.By addressing this issue, educators can better prepare future engineers to tackle complex challenges with creative and effective solutions.

Creativity-fostering methods in engineering education
Researchers and educators in engineering education have explored, proposed, or adopted various methods to foster students' creativity.These methods include (1) brainstorming [8], which is a group-based technique that helps students to generate and explore multiple ideas without judgment, (2) creative writing [10], which encourages students to express their thoughts and ideas in a free-form manner, (3) mind mapping [9], a visual tool that helps students to structure their ideas and find connections between concepts, (4) creative problem-solving [30], which involves teaching students to approach problems from unconventional perspectives and develop unique solutions and ( 5) incorporating open-ended or ill-structured problems in classes or assignments, which stimulates critical thinking and independent decision-making [31,32].
Beyond integrating individual methods into existing instructional systems, researchers have also examined systematic approaches for enhancing creativity among engineering students.Problem-based and project-based learning, for example, have been shown to effectively foster creativity [33].These approaches promote group collaboration, regular meetings, and peer support [34], providing various levels of learning environments (individual → group → society) that encourage personal growth, academic development, collaboration, competition, and real-world problem-solving competencies [35].Another strategy to support creativity is fostering design thinking skills, urging students to seek feedback and take risks [36], in line with Henriksen et al. 's [37] emphasis on design thinking's role in creativity development.Reverse engineering, involving disassembling and analyzing existing products to understand their materials, structures, and 1 3 functions [38], is another systematic approach to enhance creativity as it prompts students to reevaluate designs and propose creative improvements [39].These systematic approaches can be implemented individually or integrated within a single class e.g., [40], providing a comprehensive learning experience that nurtures students' creativity and prepares them to address complex challenges with innovative solutions in their future careers.
In addition, theatre-based creativity-fostering methods have been explored by researchers.Examples of creativityfostering methods used in theatre education include dramatic writing [41], improvisation [42], and performative embodiment [43].These methods can be cited in engineering classes to nurture engineering students' creativity.For example, Pfeiffer and colleagues [44] adapted the improvisation method from theatre education to use it in a bioengineering class where students were asked to propose forty ways to cross a room.Using theatre-based creativity-fostering exercises creates a safe zone for engineering students to think differently [44] and significantly improves their self-efficacy in winning the courses [11].
However, early-career engineering faculty members often lack formal training in teaching skills during their doctoral studies [45] and may not be required to participate in faculty development programs focused on teaching improvement [46].Consequently, these faculty members may resort to imitating or adapting teaching skills from previous educators, and while some may attend faculty development programs, these offerings might not always meet their needs or expectations [47].This gap in engineering education reveals that early-career faculty members may struggle to effectively integrate creativity-fostering techniques into their teaching practices.The need for a targeted faculty development program specifically focused on fostering creativity and tailored to the unique needs of early-career engineering faculty members is evident.Such a program would better equip these educators to inspire and cultivate creativity among their engineering students, ultimately preparing them for successful careers in a rapidly evolving and increasingly complex field.

Faculty development in engineering education
One of the key training needs for early-career engineering faculty members is learning how to teach [48].Faculty members can access various faculty development programs designed to enhance their teaching abilities.These programs often take the form of workshops, boot camps, and seminars held at conferences, events, or research projects on national, regional, or institutional levels.Notable examples include the National Engineering Teaching Initiative (NETI), the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), and the Additional Qualifications (AQ) program.
NETI is a professional development program funded by the National Science Foundation that addresses diverse topics in instructional design and implementation.These include fundamental instructional design knowledge [49], effective teaching strategies (e.g., active learning, collaborative learning, problem/project-based assignments), proficiency in instructional technology tools (e.g., visually appealing digital slides, effective online learning experiences), and learning assessment methods [50].NETI has been lauded as highly beneficial for engineering faculty [51].However, its training content primarily focuses on general knowledge delivery and competency development rather than specifically incorporating creativity-fostering skills into teaching.
In contrast to NETI's engineering focus, ACUE offers general faculty development programs for all faculty members and instructors at American colleges and universities.ACUE training emphasizes efficient class and course design, creating a positive learning environment, implementing interactive learning strategies, promoting critical thinking, and evaluating progress to guide instruction and support student development [52].This comprehensive teaching competence training plan assists faculty members in developing various teaching skills.Nonetheless, similar to NETI, ACUE's training does not specifically address how to embed methods in classes to promote students' creativity.Another example is the Additional Qualification (AQ) program offered by the Ontario College of Teachers in Canada.AQ courses provide training on theories, approaches, methods, strategies, assessments, and collaborative practices in teaching and learning [53].Nevertheless, once again, the integration of creativity-developing methods into participants' instruction is not a primary focus.
Other faculty development programs could be a month-long immersion program.For example, Morales and Prince [54] investigated 27 engineering faculty members in a one-month summer immersion faculty development program and found that these faculty members were satisfied with the training content on research-based instructional design skills.Unfortunately, this program still focused on helping early-career engineering faculty members become skillful learning designers and instructors rather than successful creativity facilitators.
All in all, these faculty development programs, both within and outside engineering education, tend to concentrate on general teaching skills rather than specifically fostering creativity in teaching.This gap in creativity development is an area that our study aims to address.In the following section, we describe the Creativity Academy and how it was developed to address these issues.

Methodology
This section outlines the research methodology used to examine the Faculty Development program offered by the Creativity Academy (CA).The CA was established as a faculty development program, and two training sessions were held in the summers of 2020 and 2021.We conducted interviews with the participating faculty members to learn how they planned to incorporate creativity into their teaching after receiving the training.Additionally, focus groups with the faculty's students were held to examine the changes in their teaching practices.
This research utilized the case study method [55,56] to attain an in-depth understanding of the CA as a bounded system within the experiences of the engineering faculty participants and their students.A case study is defined as an "empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between the phenomenon and context are not clearly evident" [56, p. 18].By emphasizing contextual conditions significant to the phenomenon of the study, it was possible to examine the interactions between the factors pertinent to the participants' experiences within the investigation's scope [56].The case study was conducted in the College of Engineering at a Midwestern R1 university in the United States.

Participants
A convenience sampling procedure was employed to recruit participants.Convenience sampling is one type of purposeful sampling in which the sample is selected based on convenience and easy accessibility [57].The sampling focused on (1) early-career engineering faculty members with less than 6 years of teaching experience and (2) students from the early-career engineering faculty members' classes after the CA training.Finally, two participant groups engaged in the study: (a) early-career engineering faculty members and (c) students from these faculty members' classes.
The first group was ten early-career faculty members (two females and eight males).They were all from the bioengineering department and recruited through departmental email communication on a voluntary principle.Each of them was offered a professional development incentive of $3,000.One participant was a newly tenured assistant professor, while the others were tenure-track assistant professors with less than 5 years of teaching experience.They participated in the CA training for the summers of 2020 and 2021, with five participants for each summer.Table 1 shows these faculty participants' demographic information.
Additionally, we had a group of 27 students (13 females, 14 males) participating in focus group interviews.These students attended classes taught by the ten faculty participants after they had completed the CA training.Twenty-four students were from the engineering program, two from the interior design program, and one from the journalism program.The students' demographic information is presented in Table 2.

Research context and implementation: the creativity academy
The Creativity Academy (CA) is a faculty development program designed and implemented to help early-career engineering faculty members design more creativity-focused classes and thereby improve their teaching skills.It was launched in August 2019 and implemented and iterated based on feedback for three years (August 2019-May 2022, see Fig. 1).The first year (August 2019-June 2020) focused on the pre-research of the CA program, preparation for training materials, and participant recruitment.In this phase, we formed three teams for the project: (1) One recruitment team with two tenured professors from the bioengineering department, (2) one instruction team with the two professors mentioned above and two additional instructors from the theatre education department, and (3) one evaluation team with two researchers from the college of education.We adopted training materials incorporating creativity-fostering exercises from theater education, aiming to help faculty participants integrate these exercises into their classes and revise their syllabi, in-class activities, and assignments accordingly.The materials were used in one of our previous studies and have been tested effective in improving students' self-efficacy in developing creativity in engineering classes (Authors, 2018).
The second and third years (July 2020-May 2022) involved training implementation and effectiveness evaluation.The training sessions were held in July 2020 and July 2021, respectively, lasting for 3 weeks in 2020 (Monday through Friday) and extending to 4 weeks in 2021 (Monday through Friday but with Wednesday off ) based on feedback from the previous year.The training was delivered online in the summer of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while in the summer of 2021, it was conducted in-person.
By the end of May 2022, CA had trained ten early-career engineering faculty members on incorporating creativityenhancing skills into their classes.The instruction team delivered the training to the faculty participants, while the evaluation team was not involved.Each morning during the training, these participants would join a 15-min debriefing meeting about the previous day's learning (on the 1st day, it was a kick-off meeting).After that, they attended a two-hour class, where they experienced various creativity-fostering activities and learned how to incorporate these exercises into their teaching.Sample activities/exercises included listing as many uses of a regular object (such as a pen, a brick, or a duster) as possible, describing methods to overcome fear or take risks, sharing their stories of failure by saying, "I failed because …" and "I failed but …," designing a task which will develop students' convergent/divergent thinking, or visualizing students' thinking process using a diagram, a map, or a symbolic picture.More introduction about these creativity-nurturing activities/exercises can be found in our previously published book chapter (Authors, 2023).In the afternoon, the faculty participants would either discuss problems with the instructors and/or group members or complete assignments with group members.The discussion or group work time was also two hours.In the evening, they read learning materials for the next day's class and wrote journal reflections about their learning.CA also evaluated the faculty participants' creativity incorporation through multiple methods, including interviews with faculty participants and focus group discussions with their students.The evaluation team conducted these tasks.Details about the evaluation methods and process can be found in Sects.3.4 and 3.5.

Research positionality
As researchers studying creativity, we always believe that creativity is something that can be taught.Here, taught does not mean directly teaching creativity as teaching languages or math to people but means providing necessary knowledge and skills and offering appropriate guidance and practice to help people develop or nurture creativity inside them.With this belief, we created this CA program, aiming to help early-career engineering faculty members incorporate creativityfostering methods into their classrooms and thus improve their teaching skills and develop their students' creativity.
Speaking of the learning theories and various aspects of instructional design, we believe that we are insiders in this subject.As education researchers, we understand various learning theories and instructional design models, principles, methods, and strategies well.We shared similar ages with the faculty participants and experienced (or were experiencing) similar career paths from tenure-track to tenured.In addition, we also teach or deliver courses to our own students.These qualifications gave us the advantage of interviewing the faculty participants and their students.It was easy for us to understand what the faculty participants and their students talked about, even if they used some terms to refer to their teaching or perceptions of teaching.Besides, these advantages helped us better understand the faculty participants' thinking processes, needs, concerns, and difficulties, and their students' needs, areas of interest, and concerns.

Research procedures
The faculty participants voluntarily joined the academy and the study.Data collection from faculty participants took place immediately after the CA training in the summers of 2020 and 2021.We interviewed the participants about what creativity-fostering methods or skills they learned from the training and their plans for incorporating creativity-fostering methods into their classes.Each interview lasted approximately 10-15 min, was audio-recorded for data analysis, and was conducted with the participants' consent and awareness of their rights.Following the academy in both summers, the faculty participants taught courses during the subsequent fall or spring semester.When their courses were more than three-fourths complete (after Week 13 in a 16-week semester), we recruited students from their classes for focus group interviews.We conducted ten focus group interviews throughout four semesters (fall 2020, spring 2021, fall 2021, and spring 2022), one focus group for each faculty participant's class.Most focus groups consisted of two to four students, although two groups had only one student each, as all students participated on a voluntary basis.Each focus group interview lasted about an hour and was audio-recorded for data analysis.All students were fully aware of their rights during the interviews, and their consent was obtained beforehand.Each student received a $20 gift card as compensation for their participation.

Research instruments
We created and used two interview protocols for use with the faculty participants and their students in the classes after the CA training.The two protocols had different foci.
The interview protocol for the faculty participants (see Appendix 1) aimed to understand their learning acquisition in the CA training and their plans to incorporate creativity-fostering methods into their teaching.The questions inquired about their perceptions of creativity-fostering exercises or activities they experienced, the most impressive part of the training, and how they planned to incorporate what they learned into their instruction.
The focus group interview protocol (see Appendix 2) for the students aimed to examine the faculty's teaching improvement from their students' perspectives.The protocol focused on students' overall experience in the classes and their perceptions of the methods fostering creativity.By asking these questions to students, we examined how the faculty participants improved their classes, whether they applied the revisions as they claimed, and what students thought of the improvement.

Data analysis
The collected data were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach [58].We utilized an automated transcription tool [59] to transcribe the audio-recorded interviews.To ensure maximum accuracy, we manually reviewed all the transcripts and contacted some participants to clarify any unclear content.We then conducted the thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's [60] six phases: familiarizing with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report.We now outline our approach to data analysis following this framework.
• Familiarizing with the data: We reviewed the transcripts and imported them into NVivo 2020 New Release [61], where we read through them multiple times to immerse ourselves in the data.• Generating initial codes: Based on our research questions, we generated 70 initial codes, such as Open-ended problems, Ideation, and Celebrate failures.We found that the codes from individual interviews corresponded with those from focus group interviews, revealing consistency in faculty participants' learning outcomes and teaching improvement.• Searching for themes: We identified patterns among the initial codes and created 12 initial (Level-2) themes, such as Lectures, Discussions, and Creativity exercises.• Reviewing themes: We ensured that the codes accurately reflected the assigned quotations by discussing them with faculty participants and students.• Defining and naming themes: We reconsidered and discussed theme names within the research team, narrowing the 12 initial themes to five Level-1 themes.• Producing the report: We reported our themes and codes, with Table 3 detailing the two-level themes and associated sample codes.

Results
In this section, we present our data analysis results.Through our data analysis of the faculty participants' perceptions of their learning outcomes and creativity incorporation plans and their students' perceptions of their revised teaching, two major themes emerged: (1) Creativity incorporation plan and (2) students' perceptions of faculty's creativity integration into teaching.

RQ1: Faculty's plans of creativity incorporation
At the end of the Creativity Academy, as what we anticipated, each faculty participant produced a plan to incorporate creativity-fostering exercises into their instruction and tried to make these exercises integrate with their existing teaching materials naturally.According to our interviews, each faculty participant mentioned two or three creativityfostering exercises or activities that they planned to incorporate into their class.Focusing on incorporating two to three exercises or activities helped them avoid a dramatic change to their extant syllabi or course design, so that they could get on the right track of creativity-incorporation more easily.Among their incorporation plans, three sub themes emerged: (1) Class activities, (2) assignments, and (3) course settings.

Class activities
The faculty participants incorporated various creativity-fostering activities or exercises into their classrooms, from flipping their classrooms to hosting typical creativity-fostering exercises such as brainstorming.For example, P02 planned to "make a [lecture] video and put it online so they [= students] can watch it on their own time."P08, aiming to develop students' divergent thinking, would preface his course "with thinking many uses of the brick for ideation."These exercises are simple to design and implement in or outside the classes, making the classes more self-paced, engaging, and productive.Compared to simply inserting a creativity-fostering exercise into a class, some faculty participants tried to make the embedded exercises integrate with their existing teaching content more naturally and helped their students find a direct connection between doing these exercises and taking the classes.For instance, to help students establish such a connection, P09 would prompt students with some reasoning while doing a creativity-fostering exercise, "Why do we do this exercise?""What's the point of it and how will this exercise help you?" "What kind of abilities will you gain from this exercise?"or "What does this exercise try to make you aware of?"With these questions in mind, P09 believed that the students would be aware of the relationship between creative thinking and their learning content.According to some faculty participants, helping students understand why they do and what they get from doing a creativity-fostering exercise is more important than doing the exercise itself.

Assignments
Creativity will also be incorporated into assignments.Faculty participants would use individual and group projects.For example, P10 would give students three projects to develop their creativity.The first one would be an individual project, aiming to develop students' divergent thinking and encouraging them to "look to multiple possible ways of solving the problem." The second one would be a two-person group project.P10 would introduce group dynamics to his students and implement some of creativity-fostering exercises at the beginning of the project as icebreakers to help students communicate as a group.The third one would be a four-person exploratory team project, aiming to encourage students to "come up with something that's a unique idea."Through the three progressive projects, the students would start the problem-solving processes individually and end it with group efforts.They would not only experience how creative ideas were sparked through independent thinking and group collaboration but learn how to compare and evaluate separate ideas to form a unique one.
Open-ended problems will be adopted in the assignments.The faculty participants admitted that many things in engineering education are straightforward and leave little space for students to use creativity.To help students think divergently, they would incorporate open-endedness in assignments and encourage students to propose multiple solutions.For instance, P06 would "start off as a creativity exercise … [such as] all the ways you can use a brick" to put students in a mindset that no answers are bad answers.After that, he would point out the key components of the problem and prompt students with a series of questions for them to consider.

Course settings
The faculty participants would adopt more creativity-friendly grading policies to foster students' creativity, such as bonus points for creativity or freedom of choosing risk-taking ideas.As an illustration, P01 may offer "bonus points that students can accumulate over the course" to encourage students to accomplish the assignments using more creativity through the entire semester.Similarly, P08 would provide rewards for students who apply some creative ideas in the assignments.To nurture students' risk-taking mindset, P08 would allow students to choose to use traditional or irregular solutions or not, and for those who chose not to use, he "will not take points; I will not punish them."

RQ2: Students' perceptions of faculty's creativity integration into teaching
We used focus-group interviews to learn how students perceived our faculty participants' teaching improvement after the CA training.Table 4 shows students' mentioning of in-class and after-class teaching and learning activities implemented by the faculty participants in semesters after the Creativity Academy.The Arabic numbers "1" in the table indicates that an activity was mentioned by at least one student and "0" indicates not.

In-class activities
Overall, in classes, lectures and discussion were two major types of teaching or learning activities that faculty participants used.Students from nine out of the ten classes mentioned that their professors delivered lectures in classes, including  • Alternative uses of a brick 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 the class by P02 who planned to flip the classroom by providing students with lecture videos ahead of the classes.In the lectures, the faculty participants mostly present formulas, maps, class notes, or other thing that they believed important for students understand the learning materials.However, such lectures might dry and unattractive to students.Therefore, some faculty participants would adopt different strategies to make students feel better.For example, one student from P07's class shared that the instructor "would break up his lectures.That was pretty helpful."Students from eight out of the ten classes indicated that the instructors hosted discussion in classes.The discussion was usually implemented in small groups, with students bouncing off ideas and exchanging different perspectives.Students found this kind of collaborative thinking very helpful, as S18 from P06's class recalled, " [We] find out what's different about it … and then everyone comes up with different ideas on how to solve it." Students could feel how sincere the instructors wanted them to discuss in the class, as S27 from P09's class commented, "In lots of classes, everyone just posts once and leaves and never checks it again.But I think in this class, there are actual discussions that happen, and it's really cool." More than one student mentioned that their professors embedded creativity-fostering exercises in the above two learning activities.Most students found the creativity-fostering exercises very interesting and inspiring.They particularly enjoyed exercises that trained their divergent thinking, such as figuring out different ways to cross a room.Whenever some students believed there could not be any more ways, other students could always spark a new idea.S17 from P10's class believed that this kind of creative thinking practice "encourages [us] to think ways that we weren't taught to think."Table 5 shows more in-class activities applied by the faculty participants and observed by their students.
Finally, we found an interesting comparison of one of our faculty participants' teaching from one student's narratives.The student was straightforward, "I would mention, as somebody who took the class last year, that his teaching definitely has changed.We didn't do nearly these type of [creativity-fostering] exercises, and he wasn't nearly as engaging as he is this year.He is much … he has … you might drop your jaw at this, but he used to be even less engaging."These words gave us confidence that the CA training had some value in helping improve our faculty participants' teaching skills and quality.

After-class activities
Outside of the classes, group projects, problem-based work, and video watching were major types of homework or assignments that the faculty participants would give their students.According to the students, the problem-based or project-based assignments were not simple repeat of the content in classes or the textbook; rather, they emphasized on students' knowledge transfer and divergent thinking.For example, S19 commented, "It [the project] shows you the concepts that we've learned in class just in a different application.We might go over something one way in class a couple times, whether on quizzes or classwork, but the homework is where the other applications will be brought in to us." S20 added, "We kind of are encouraged to more approach a problem that doesn't have one specific answer." To foster students' creativity, it is important to help students understand what they wanted to accomplish in assignments.To reach this goal, some faculty participants gave students great freedom to complete assignments with their own choices.Students enjoyed such less restricted assignment rules.For instance, S07 complimented P03's group project, "[The professor] make our project go in the avenue that we want it to be rather than giving us like a set rule book." In addition, students mentioned more other assignments from faculty participants.For example, P07 gave his students a "Make a metaphor" task.P08 promoted more social risk-taking than intellectual risk-taking and gave students a "Community building" assignment Table 6 shows more details about what after-class assignments the faculty participants used.

Discussion
Faculty members in the early stages of their careers selectively integrated creativity-enhancing exercises into their existing teaching frameworks.Specifically, they chose two or three exercises that had the most impact and seamlessly wove them into their current teaching methods.While lectures and discussions remained the primary modes of instruction, these added exercises served as supplementary enhancements rather than a complete transformation of their teaching approach.Students who experienced these modified teaching methods reported a noticeable positive impact on their creative thinking skills.Specifically, the faculties first let students watch videos about the importance of creativity and idea generation before the classes.At the beginning of the classes, they would walk students through some creativity-fostering activities, such as brainstorming, using good lead-in activities to motivate students' learning interest in the class.A typical activity is to name various uses of a brick or a pen.To prevent one activity from occupying too much class time, they might chunk the activity into different classes.Most of them chose to apply two or three creativity-fostering activities that impressed them the most in the training, though we demonstrated to them more than ten creativity-fostering methods, activities, or exercises.
After the lead-in activities, the faculties would give lectures.They may use different designs to engage students.One example of such designs was the use of 3D animations to demonstrate complex concepts or dynamics of a formula (by P02).In addition to lectures, they would increase the proportion of in-class discussions or other interactions (e.g., Q&A) with students.They might also have their students present their assignments or projects in classes.
After classes, the faculties would give students more freedom (e.g., more open-ended questions) and a more tolerant grading policy to encourage their creativity by providing different answers or solutions in homework questions, assignments, or projects.For example, P06 planned to encourage the students to propose as many solutions to heat a house under certain conditions as possible.Besides, some faculties considered using active learning methods such as group projects to foster students' communication [62] and collaboration [63,64] competencies to promote creativity.Other faculties used methods such as bonus points to encourage students to use more creativity in assignments.
While doing all these creativity-fostering exercises, some faculty participants would try to help students understand the connection between the creativity exercises and what they were learning or applying.They would help students to reflect on the purposes of doing the creativity exercises, the way the creativity would help with knowledge application or transfer, the abilities or competencies they develop from the exercises, or the failures or lessons they could learn from the exercises.Researchers and educators support this kind of learning-frequently reflecting on what is learned or missing-because reflection is believed to be correlated with learners' deep learning and creativity [65,66].

Students' perceptions of faculties' creativity incorporation
According to students, lectures and discussions were the two main teaching methods that participants used in their classes, even if they had received the training in CA.This was what we expected because we did not want to see that participants failed to control their classes due to a dramatic revision to their existing syllabi or teaching plans.Though some instructors used small innovations (little-c according to Kaufman and Beghetto's [67] Four C model) such as drawing maps or playing animations in the lectures to attract students, some students still found that lectures were boring or repeating the textbook.This perception indicates that direct instruction, such as giving a lecture, may not motivate students very well, as previous researchers in other fields found that direct teaching, compared to more student-engaged teaching methods such as project-based learning, may significantly demotivate learners [68].The discussion, however, seemed more interesting to many students because of the various ways to interact with the instructors or other students, aligning with previous findings that interaction is a good way to promote classroom learning [69,70].
Although lectures and discussions maintain the mainstream in the classes, students believed that the theatrebased creativity-fostering exercises they experienced were very helpful in opening their eyes and minds and considering the possibility of using creativity in their classwork.Noted that self-efficacy is related to creativity [71], previous studies found that theatre-based creativity-fostering exercises increased students' self-efficacy in succeeding in their coursework and using more creativity in the assignments [11].Though the current study did not measure students' self-efficacy, we could still imagine their excitement from their interview narratives when they found their professors used creativity-fostering exercises to engage them in classes and realized that creativity could be nurtured through such kind of practices.Many students (not only engineering students) have been long educated that creativity is absent in their minds [72].It is important for educators to rebuild students' awareness that creativity is inherent in them and that they can use creativity to solve various problems, even in an engineering class, which is usually full of sophisticated formulas and rigorous calculation processes.
In addition to the creativity-fostering exercises, the open-ended project-based assignments gave students more freedom to choose what they wanted to do.We believe that free choice is an important prerequisite for creativity, as previous researchers argued [73].Some projects required students to complete using alternative thinking, strategies, or solutions, which should be different from those discussed in classes.In students' opinions, these requirements gave them more freedom to determine how they wanted to complete an assignment instead of following a fixed path set by the instructor.This perception from students was strong evidence that our faculty participants did encourage their students to approach problems with multiple solutions, which might give students more space to think differently.
In addition, the instructors' class policies (e.g., the grading policy) may also encourage students to use more creativity instead of sticking to "safer" or more conservative solutions.For example, as we discussed in previous paragraphs, the creativity-fostering exercises enhanced students' self-efficacy.Higher self-efficacy inspired students to complete more challenging tasks [74].As difficulty is elevated, students might face more risks, and they cannot become more creative unless they are willing to risk trying some novel ideas or solutions to complete tasks [44].In this case, setting more tolerant grading rules, such as rewarding students' choices of using risk-taking solutions with extra credits and not punishing their failures as results of applying new ideas or solutions (as our faculty participants did) will greatly give students more courage to think more creatively when completing tasks.
Finally, students from the classes taught by the 2021 faculties observed more in-class and after-class activities than their counterparts from the classes delivered by the 2020 faculties, probably because the 2021 cohort received the training in a face-to-face mode, which facilitated group interaction [75] and brought them better learning outcomes and a more enjoyable interaction experience compared to online learning [76].

Implications
As a faculty development program, the CA aims to improve early-career engineering faculty members' teaching skills by helping them incorporate creativity-fostering methods into teaching.Some important implications were summarized from our findings.The implications will be helpful for the career development of early-career engineering faculty members and the future implementation of the CA and relevant research.
First, it is crucial and promising to teach early-career engineering faculty members how to incorporate creativityfostering methods into their instruction.Previous research suggests that these faculty members typically acquire their teaching methods from their prior teachers or advisors [47].Given the long absence of emphasis on creativity in engineering education [1,4,5], it is unlikely that these early-career faculty members were exposed to many in-class creativity-enhancing exercises during their doctoral studies.Therefore, it becomes essential to equip them with the skills to incorporate creativity-stimulating activities into their courses early in their careers.The CA training provides a valuable opportunity for these faculty members to learn teaching skills centered on creativity development.By actively participating in the creativity-nurturing exercises (find more examples in [47]), early-career faculty members will recognize the vitality of fostering students' creativity in engineering classes and learn how to implement these practices effectively.If such training is scheduled during the summer before or after their first year of teaching and spans four or five weeks, it will be very beneficial to these faculty members.
Second, it is important to teach the faculty participants how to assess students' creativity performance.The existing CA training focused on teaching faculty participants various ways to incorporate creativity-fostering methods into their teaching.These methods made them pay more attention to students' divergent thinking rather than convergent thinking.Students' narratives indicated that the creativity-fostering activities used by different faculty participants were similar.For example, more than half of the faculty participants asked students to list various uses of a brick, and many of them emphasized more on producing various ideas or multiple solutions and less on comparing or analyzing which idea or solution is more efficient or effective.If we run the CA training again, we should teach the faculty participants how to access creativity so that they may also value students' convergent thinking and examine to what extent the students' creativity is effective [15] or appropriate [16].
Finally, we need to adjust creativity-fostering exercises for online training.The training in the CA was forced to be online in the summer of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, while in the summer of 2021, it was face-to-face.The faculty participants in 2021 used more creativity-fostering activities in classes than their peers in 2020, and so were students' observations.Because some creativity-fostering exercises, such as "40 ways to cross to a room" or "Draw a box with the left hand and a circle with the right hand, " are better conducted in an in-person environment, we believe that, for our current CA program design, a face-to-face training might be better than an online training.From an instructional design perspective, some exercises need to be adjusted to make them better fit the online learning context if we want to expand the training to more faculty members from different universities through delivering online CA in the future.

Limitations and future work
Though we tried to provide convincing results and findings, the current study still has some limitations due to the limited resources that we could use for the project.First, the current CA was conducted in only one department at one university.We have a plan to expand the CA training to diverse programs or departments at different universities and include more early-career faculty members from different disciplines for future research.Although some researchers may argue that if individual participants have stronger "information power" [78, p. 2], which means more information an individual participant holds, then a small sample size for a qualitative study might be acceptable [77], we still believe that more participants will provide us with more sufficient information to understand discipline-specific faculty members' training needs and perceptions of creativity and thus offer more helpful training content and materials to them.Comparative studies of creativity incorporation before and after faculty participants attending the CA training or between those who attend and those who did not attend the CA training might generate significant findings.This is an area for future research.
Second, the current CA did not measure the faculty participants and their students' learning experience and outcomes in quantitative methods.We had only ten faculty participants, which invalidated many quantitative assessment methods.Considering the small sample, our study was purely qualitative.With more faculty members and students involved, we may complement the study with more quantitative methods measuring their learning outcomes and learning experiences, including their engagement, motivation, satisfaction, or self-efficacy.We may also cross-examine the results using mixed data analysis methods [78], which may help us investigate participants' performance from both the quantitative and qualitative perspectives and provide more triangulation for the validity and reliability of the qualitative data.

Conclusion
It may seem ironic and contradictory that while creativity is highly valued in engineering, it is not emphasized as much in engineering education.To address this issue, simply highlighting the importance of creativity among engineering faculty members is insufficient.In reality, no faculty member would deny the crucial role of creativity in both engineering and engineering education.The real challenge lies in building trust in creativity-fostering methods among engineering faculty members and encouraging them to apply these methods in their teaching.In this study, we developed a faculty development program called the Creativity Academy, designed to teach early-career engineering faculty members how to integrate creativity into their classes.We incorporated creativity-fostering techniques from theatre education and demonstrated how faculty participants could utilize these methods to enhance their instruction.We assessed their mastery of these techniques and their creativity incorporation plans through individual interviews with these faculties and triangulated the results using focus group interviews with their students.
Our findings suggest that adopting creativity-fostering methods from theatre education effectively improved the faculty members' ability to integrate creativity into their teaching.At the same time, the learning process reinforced their belief in the effectiveness of these methods for nurturing students' creativity.Moreover, they recognized the need to help students connect creativity with knowledge application rather than simply engaging them in isolated creativityfostering exercises.By achieving these goals, students' creativity can be better developed.Although there is still room for improvement, the current Creativity Academy training has revealed the feasibility and effectiveness of using an interdisciplinary approach to enhance engineering faculty members' ability to incorporate creativity in their teaching and promote their students' creative thinking.

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 The design, implementation, and evaluation processes of the Creativity Academy from August 2019 through May 2022

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-023-00061-y 1 Participants' pattern of creativity incorporation into teaching After the training in CA, the faculty participants revised their syllabi and made different plans accordingly to incorporate creativity into their teaching.Though individually different, their plans basically followed the same pattern: Lead in using creativity-fostering exercises → Deliver lectures with more in-class interaction → Give more open-ended homework, assignments, or projects → Reflect on the relationship between creativity and what students learn.Figure 2 shows the faculty participants' creativity incorporation pattern in their classes.

Fig. 2
Fig. 2 Faculty participants' creativity incorporation pattern in their class after receiving the CA training

Table 3
Themes and sample codes used in the data analysis

Table 4
Students' mentioning/reporting of in-class and after-class activities implemented by the faculty participants (each "1" indicates mentioning/reporting while each "0" indicates none)

Table 5
More in-class creativity-fostering activities or exercises perceived by students could kind of use some of the methods that like I learned in Capstone, for example, and find, try to find new ways to apply things that are already out there, or maybe just new systems on our own, and just kind of explore all the options and then bring those back together into multiple solutions.So that exercise is not just memorizing information, but learning how to combine different ideas for a unique solution.I thought it was useful." Activities QuotesSmall or mini/short videos S26, "It's a technique that he [= P09] uses, which he embeds all of like little two to three-minute videos within his lecture and doesn't post it as an individual link.I feel like a lot of times, if it's posted as an individual link, we may think it's not mandatory, or we may just start past it."Virtual industrial visit S06, "It was helpful to give a virtual industrial visit.So she [= P03] would, in the "cafe" [= online office hour], she would have a short clip of how setting food product is made, show that and relates that to the module that has been taught and how they are applying those in the food processing."Brainstorming S02, "I think that breakout rooms because that gave us like brainstorming sessions during the class … the question would be presented, like on the slides.And then we'd go to the breakout room for probably like five minutes or something like that … And then we just be like, spitballing ideas, really.And we come back.And then he [= P04] asked the group, like each breakout group, to present, kind of like a summary of what was said."Open-ended questions S09, "It was kind of an open-ended [question].Your goal is to design a system that is going to be used for that.And so we got to kind of go on our own and evaluate all of these different options or different methods, and then we [= P08] uses that as a way to check in to see who actually came to class.And also, he'll ask us like different questions that was spread out throughout the reading, kind of to see who read and also, it also helps like foster discussion."Literature presentation S02, "It really helps me, like, see what was currently being used, and like, put what we learned in the class into action, I guess … and then apply that to the exam, like open-ended questions.So I think like, a kind of like gave a foundation I guess."

Table 6
More after-class creativity-fostering activities or exercises perceived by students Make a metaphor S23, "There was a point at which he [= P07] tried.I know he used a rose at some point, but I don't remember whathe was using that one for, or if that was just a practice lecture on actual metaphors, because I know there was an extra credit assignment that was to come up with a metaphor for a project." "I think she just pushes us to kind of, like make our project go in the avenue that we want it to be rather than giving us like a set rule book or like all of our whatever is called like a syllabus with all the information.SoI think that's nice in terms of the fact that she really does want us to choose what's going in our presentation, what we're talking about, what's interesting to us as a group, and what we want everyone to know." sonality tests and that was cool, because … you can just kind of figure out more about yourself, and like how you operate best, and … kind of knowing how you work best with people and how other people would work best with you."Engineering contest S06, "She [= P03] also encouraged us to present our project for international competitions and stuff.So I think that also fosters some creativity.And I don't know if anyone in the class has done that yet.That's one great avenue."