Conceptualising and exploring creative pedagogies and design thinking in transdisciplinary STEAM higher education courses

Higher Education Institutions are increasingly facing challenges in designing courses that enable students to develop the transdisciplinary knowledge, skills and understanding needed to engage with complex ‘wicked’ problems. This article reports on a conceptual framework for STEAM in Higher Education (HE), in which design thinking is interwoven with four key features of creative pedagogies: transdisciplinarity, embodied dialogue, empowerment and agency, and ethics and trusteeship. The study explores: how does the design thinking–creative pedagogies framework manifest for participants in practice? The framework was used in four international HE short courses entwining sciences, arts and entrepreneurship to facilitate participants’ responses to a different ‘wicked problem’ in each country, based on the local context. The framework was analysed across the courses to explore how it operates in practice through iterative developments, to help educators understand how to develop it further. The study used a mixed-method, participatory research design, with 82 participants in total. This paper highlights the key creative pedagogy features and design thinking approach working together in productive patterns, helping teachers and partners establish new learning strategies and offering insight into how transdisciplinary learning around complex problems can be facilitated in STEAM Higher Education.