Today creativity is a critical requirement for success and is even regarded as an “indispensable prerequisite” for innovative ability (Schubert, 2009, p.1). Creative minds are important for companies because they contribute to innovative products and processes and make strategic decisions that enable competitive advantage. Along with critical thinking, cooperation and communication, creativity is considered one of the most important skills of the 21^st century (Lai et al., 2018) and therefore central to higher vocational teacher education. Creativity is understood as a transversal skill “which everyone can develop” (Cachia et al., 2010, p. 9) and thus the creative potential of all students should be promoted interdisciplinarily by all university lecturers equally.

Although scientific interest in creativity has risen greatly in recent years, it is still difficult to define the complex phenomenon of creativity. Various studies about creativity in higher education illustrate that basic agreements about a common definition of creativity are lacking and that even contradictory understandings are available (cf. Amabile, Hadley, & Kramer, 2002; Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007). In psychology, there is a standard definition of creativity that consists of two criteria: ‘Creativity requires (a) novelty or originality and (b) utility or usefulness’ (Simonton 2012, 97). Furthermore, creativity must always be seen in the context of an area or domain, and creative work must be recognized by others as creative (Glăveanu & Lahlou, 2012). However, in higher education, it proves difficult to capture students' creativity according to the standard definition, as students are not entrepreneurs and therefore do not produce new and useful products for a market (Cropley & Cropley, 2010). The European report on “Creative Learning and Innovative Teaching” (Cachia et al., 2010) also shows that many lecturers are unclear about how creativity should be integrated didactically into lectures, especially in terms of learning and assessment. Overall, it is therefore difficult for lecturers to recognize a creative performance of students or even to assess it.

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the conceptualization of student creativity as well as the promotion of creativity in higher teacher education. For this purpose, the overall objective of this study was to find out (1) how university lecturers conceptualize students' creativity and (2) how university lecturers promote students' creativity in their lectures.

For this study, an explorative approach was applied where university lecturers were requested to describe how they perceive and conceptualize student creativity. This approach has been used before by Jahnke, Haertel and Wildt (2015), who examined student creativity in a higher education context in Germany. For this purpose, the interview guideline used by Jahnke, Haertel and Wildt (2015) was adapted to the situation of the Swiss university/college context of vocational teacher training. The interviews were conducted from June to mid-October 2021 with university lecturers from all Swiss universities that train VET teachers, e.g. Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training (SFUVET), Zurich University of Teacher Education, University of Zurich and the pedagogical Universities of Luzerne and St. Gallen. The interview guideline was partly structured. The lecturers were asked to describe in detail the course in which they teach the most, for example, learning objectives, learning activities, content, assessments etc. They were also asked “What characterizes a creative course for you?”, “What do you consider a creative performance/effort of your students?”, “How can you ‘see’, if/when a student is creative?” The interviews were done via MS Teams and transcribed. Afterwards they were analyzed with MAXQDA by means of qualitative content analysis (Mayring & Frenzl, 2019) as well as open coding (Brymann, 2008). First, each interview was analyzed in detail in order to understand the participants' perceptions of creativity and to match the material with the identified categories of Jahnke, Haertel and Wildt (2015) (structured content analysis). Subsequently, all interviews were compared, analyzed and summarized on a higher level. A total of 19 interviews were realized with university lecturers from five universities of teacher education in German-speaking Switzerland. The average interview duration was around 58 minutes. 10 participants (53%) were female, 9 participants (47%) were male. At the time of the interview, the participants were on average 48 years old, the youngest participant was 36 years old and the oldest participant was 60 years old. The teaching experience of the participants at the university level averaged 11 years. 6 lecturers held a leadership position, e.g., program director, at the time of the interview.

The findings show that the interviewed university lecturers always associate creativity of students with creating something new in a given time frame, e.g. finding a new, unforeseeable way to solve a problem. According to the descriptions of the participants in the interviews, creativity of students can be conceptualized on the basis of the following aspects: (1) student self-reflection, (2) curiosity and motivation, (3) producing something, (4) multiperspectives (teacher vs. student) and (5) when students develop original new ideas. Only the facet independent decisions from the 6-facet-model of Jahnke, Haertel and Wildt (2015) cannot be fully confirmed. Furthermore, the findings illustrate that the promotion of creativity plays a rather subordinate role in higher vocational teacher education in Switzerland. The interviewed university teachers do not formulate any interdisciplinary learning objectives to promote creativity and use creativity techniques, e.g. brainstorming, only sporadically and not consciously to develop student creativity. However, creativity is possibly supported in the individual courses, for example, by keeping learning journals to reflect on one's own learning process, by independent learning, and by producing creative products for action. In terms of further research, it would be interesting to empirically examine if and to what extent these aspects actually promote individual creativity of students in higher education. Against this background, the general question arises as to what role the promotion of creativity and other 21st century skills should play in the training of (vocational) teachers and where and how prospective teachers learn to promote 21st century skills in their teaching in the course of their teacher training.

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