HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHERS AND CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING AS A TOOL TO FOSTER THINKING SKILLS

The research that we present here is based on the interpretative paradigm, considering the importance of higher education teachers in order to learn about their position regarding creative problem solving as a tool to foster thinking skills among university students. Moreover, the research has a phenomenological nature since it is focused on the study of the meaning of human experience (Buendía Eisman, Colás Bravo and Hernández Pina, 1998) in the specific case of higher education teachers at a Mexican public university and the meaning for them of the concept of creative problem solving and their experience in this field.
We start with the premise that creative problem solving is a skill that can and should be developed as a key cross-curricular element in educational programmes at a university level since it can allow us to achieve the objective of promoting integral education and help students to reach self-fulfillment as they do not just focus on cognitive aspects but also on personal development.
This study focuses on four higher education teachers selected due to their interest in their concept of creative problem solving and their ideas about its use on the educational process. These higher education teachers represent a varied sample (women and men) which includes two types of participants (those with teaching experience of less than 5 years and those with more than 15 years) seeking to show different perspectives and to represent the complexity of the phenomenon studied as well as identifying differences and coincidences, patterns and particularities which exist in this varied field.
As our main methodological tool, we used a semi-structured interview, considering that this makes it possible to focus on the problem, and to direct and understand our research; furthermore, it allows us to understand the perception of the participants in relation to a particular situation and to express their impressions and interpretation of the situation studied (Colás Bravo, 1998; Quivy and Campenhoudt, 2008).
As provisional results, we can mention that the higher education teachers interviewed agreed that the inclusion of creative problem solving as a cross-curricular element in university studies is a positive factor. Their answers in the interviews also suggest to promote teaching strategies to include this kind of problem solving such as joint work between higher education teachers, the use of real life situations, transferring solutions from one area to another, applying theory to problems and searching for information for specific problems.