Roulston, Kathryn., Acheampong, Kwame O., Callahan, Mark, Nibbelink, Nathan, King, Elizabeth, and Haas, Brian. “Implementation of a Curricular Intervention to Enhance Imaginative and Collaborative Capacity Among Graduate STEM Students.” Thinking Skills and Creativity. (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2026.102314
Findings indicate that participation in learning opportunities involving collaboration across disciplines provided significant opportunities for students to reflect on the meaning of creativity and collaboration in relation to their work and disciplinary interests, and how they might engage in interdisciplinary work in the future.
Featured in a special issue on “Understanding, Designing, and Teaching the Curriculum to Incorporate the Cultivation of Thinking Skills,” the article shares research from a series of arts-based workshops developed at UGA with the support of an Innovations in Graduate Education award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant provided $499,835 of research funding to the university and represented a partnership of campus programs including the UGA Arts Collaborative and the Center for Integrative Conservation Research.
Based on student feedback and the success of pilot programs supported by the Graduate School and the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts, a team of researchers from the arts, humanities, and sciences worked together to design activities to train students to think creatively, to collaborate across disciplines, and to work with people with different perspectives, knowledge, and values.