“Everything Would Have Worked If It Wasn’T For That Crap Mirror”: The Intersection Of Failure And Creativity In Integrated Stem Education

Abstract

The sentiment that creativity is the most important skill needed to solve the problems that we face is repeated by different business and industry leaders around the world (Bronson & Merryman, 2010; NEA, n.d.; Nussbaum et al., 2005; Sammio, 2017). The call for creativity has been amplified in response to the problems and obstacles caused by COVID19. Yet, creativity remains the most neglected 21st century skill addressed in STEM education. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation was to develop strong conceptual connections between creativity and failure within an integrated STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) unit guided by the intersection of failure and creativity framework (IFCF; Stretch & Roehrig, 2021) through a qualitative case study design. Specifically, this study proposed to understand how the structure of an integrated STEM unit and the teacher’s role in implementation of the STEM unit may influence students’ use and application of creativity and learning from failure. The single case study was of a group of four sixth-grade boys engaged in addressing an engineering design challenge. Seven themes emerged from this research that inform the pedagogy and implementation of integrated STEM education. The following themes were identified through analysis of the small group discourse: (1) Creativity ensues in areas that are ill defined within engineering design problems, such as context; (2) As the design problem narrows (through specified content learning or overly defined context) students’ creativity narrows as well; (3) The potential of learning through failure is most prominent during the testing of the design solution; (4) The curricular focus on specific science content and the subsequent narrowing of context in engineering design problem scenarios created one possible design solution; (5) The sequence of lessons within a curriculum created a rigid linear progression through the engineering design process (EDP) with few opportunities for iteration; and (6) The teacher further constrained students’ creativity and ability to learn from failure through missed opportunities. This study provided empirical data to support the need for a modified engineering design process (EDP) utilized in integrated STEM units to promote creativity and innovation in problem solving in STEM.