Culturally Responsive Engineering Education: Creativity Through “Empowered to Change” in the U.S. and “Admonished to Preserve” in Japan

Abstract

Enhancing creativity is an indispensable goal of many engineering courses. However, with flourishment of global collaboration in various engineering classrooms and best educational practices being replicated across cultures, there are not many curriculum interventions that originate from students' diverse cultural needs. When cultural differences are ignored, students may get culturally biased grades and face confusion and difficulties. For instance, the notion of "disruption" and "breakthrough" in product design innovation is culturally and locally shaped in the U.S. and might be considered undesirable in Japan. For example, Japanese students coming to a U.S. university for a co-final presentation with their U.S. student partners may get ill-evaluated due to lack of articulation on how their ideas break through the status quo. This is problematic given that student evaluation is less based on traditional exams of fundamental science knowledge, but rather increasingly subject to culturally-shaped experience.The paper is centered around the idea that engineers are motivated by the cultural values with which they identify. In the U.S., the motivation to promote change is widely held to underpin the generation of new ideas and value creation. In contrast, preservation is perceived as demanding but taken very seriously in Japan and change from this perspective can be seen as an unconstrained, irresponsible mission that requires less effort.The paper empirically examines the cultural dimensions of creativity in engineering education, specifically how engineering students' motivations for creative problem-solving are different in the U.S. than in Japan. A cross-cultural survey study was designed and run to test the hypothesis that Japanese (U.S.) engineers are more (less) motivated to create new ideas when they are asked to preserve rather than change something. We will share the encouraging preliminary results and discuss implications. Engineers across different cultures have the capacity of both -create to change, and create to preserve. But different cultures emphasize different values. If engineering educators (and managers at organizations) of a certain sociocultural context celebrate their cultural values and restrict others, either consciously or not, this would put people with different values at disadvantage. With the salient power dynamics between educators (managers) and students (junior employees), this means alienation, misjudgment and disconnection. The paper underlies the importance for educators to learn about the different cultural forces behind different engineering behaviors. The research contributes to the cross-cultural literature of engineering education.

The influence of culture on creativity in ideation: a review

“…6) Singaporean students exhibited superior performance on the novelty metric, while Portuguese students demonstrated better results on the appropriateness metric (Koronis et al, 2019). 7) Engineering students from the United States showed a tendency to achieve higher scores in creativity, novelty, usefulness and liking of their own ideas than their Japanese counterparts (Ge et al, 2021). 8) When working independently, American students demonstrated higher levels of originality than their Chinese counterparts.…”

“…Regarding the publication channels, six articles (Ge et al, 2021;Haines, 2013;Koronis et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2011;Wodehouse et al, 2011;Ye & Robert, 2017) Computing, the International Conference on Engineering Design, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Scholars from various countries, including Canada, China, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States, examined the impact of culture on creativity in ideation.…”

“…Approximately two-thirds of the studies enlisted subjects from different countries in order to use cultural indexes or nationalities as independent variables in their analyses. This allowed the authors to assess differences among groups and verify the connection between culture and creativity (Ge et al, 2021;Haines, 2013;Koronis et al, 2019;Liou & Lan, 2018;Nouri et al, 2015;Peng et al, 2021;Saad et al, 2015;Wodehouse et al, 2011;Wodehouse & Maclachlan, 2014;Yi et al, 2013;Zheng et al, 2022). Seven studies conducted in a single country recruited participants and manipulated their cultural values before ideation (Bechtoldt et al, 2012;Choi et al, 2019;Goncalo & Duguid, 2012;Goncalo & Staw, 2006;Lee & Choi, 2022;Wang et al, 2011;Ye & Robert, 2017).…”

“…The first one was based on nationality, and it compared the creativity of participants from different countries and with diverse experiences. This approach employed countries as a variable to demonstrate the specific cultural background or experience positively correlated to creativity (Ge et al, 2021;Koronis et al, 2019;Liou & Lan, 2018;Nouri et al, 2015;Peng et al, 2021;Saad et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2011;Yi et al, 2013;Zheng et al, 2022). The researchers using the second approach recruited participants from different countries and employed cultural-dimension indexes to analyse the connections between culture and creativity (Haines, 2013;Wodehouse et al, 2011;Wodehouse & Maclachlan, 2014).…”

“…Of these nine studies, four recruited participants from the United States and China (Liou & Lan, 2018;Nouri et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2011;Zheng et al, 2022). The rest included individuals from the United States and Morocco (Peng et al, 2021), the United States and Japan (Ge et al, 2021), Singapore and Portugal (Koronis et al, 2019), China and Canada (Saad et al, 2015), and China and Germany (Yi et al, 2013). The findings concerning culture and creativity have been summarised as follows: 1) Chinese participants working in intercultural groups scored higher on the breadth of ideas (the average semantic distance between any two ideas) than those working in intracultural groups.…”