Creativity in Biomedical Education: Senior Teaching and Research Staff's Conceptualization and Implications for Pedagogy Development

摘要

As an emerging new interdisciplinary area, biomedical education has been recently paid a growing attention to its curriculum design. Creativity has been suggested as a key element in its pedagogy development. This paper will focus on a research question: how do the senior teaching and research staff conceptualize 'creativity' in relation to their daily working experience and based on such conceptualizations, what are the implications for pedagogy development in biomedical education? Theoretically, we will take a departure from social-cultural approach to creativity that emphasizes shaping roles of environmental influences on creativity in a specific context of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, such as biomedical education. An empirical study by qualitative interviews (n = 15) with senior research and teaching staff at different Spanish institutions will further help to provide evidence that guides to answer the research question. The data analysis shows that creativity should be an essential element in curriculum and there are needs of creativity training programmes in biomedical education. Meanwhile, pedagogical changes should be towards encouraging collaborative work, critical thinking, problem solving by creative problem-based learning scenarios, promoting autonomy in applicable and useful projects, working with creative articles in their specific field with students, fostering students' skills in experiment design at university, and developing new evaluation systems, which underpins the necessity of providing a systematic educational environment for creativity development in future biomedical education.