Teaching Creativity in Design Aesthetics: An Introspective Account of a University Lecturer

This paper is an introspection of a lecturer upon the experience of teaching creativity between September 2011 and June 2013 to four different cohorts of students who enrolled in two Bachelor of Design programs in Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Malaysia. Being the only educational university in Malaysia, the teacher training legacy of UPSI provides a unique environment for both the lecturers and students to engage not only with the subject matters of design but also the pedagogy of design. In other words, the programs aim to nurture graduates who could become either designers, instructors or both in two fields of specialization-animation design and advertising design. Creative thinking has been recognized as a mutually essential attribute of being either professional designers or design instructors. Nonetheless, while learning to be creative in design is hard, teaching creativity in design courses is indeed doubly hard. For this reason, this paper juxtaposes the scope of creativity taught by the lecturer in achieving the challenging and yet exciting learning outcomes, as an attempt to initiate pedagogical discourse among design lecturers.