Problem Solving and Creativity

In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations, sustainable development education is one of the 17 sustainable development goals. Creativity is a key driver for sustainable social development and an important guarantee for promoting sustainable development. In sustainable development education, enhancing student creativity was also emphasized. As the crucial part of the educational system, the responsibility of the university includes not only disseminating knowledge but also cultivating student creativity.

Creativity is generally defined as novel, useful products. Students' novel, useful products in the classroom are new ideas that are put forward by themselves. To promote students' creativity, researchers recommended encouraging students to ask more questions rather than merely providing them with the answers. However, students put forward questions or disagreements that may lead to teacher–student conflict. Previous studies concluded that conflict was negative and can result in a broad range of social and academic problems, such as misconduct, disciplinary infractions, and school suspensions. As a result, the researchers suggested avoiding and eliminating all teacher–student conflicts. Hence, conflict's beneficial role has rarely been studied.

Conflicts should not always be regarded as negative behavior. Conflict is the disagreement in opinions between people or groups. The occurrence of conflict in the classroom is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Previous research emphasized encouraging students' competence to solve uncertainty for enhancing students' creativity. In this regard, the ability of how to deal with conflict should be reconsidered. Students' creativity requires challenging ideas and critical thinking, and teacher–student conflict leads to healthy debate and productive controversy, which expands students' perspectives and promotes divergent thinking. Consequently, we predict that teacher–student conflict can benefit students' creativity.

Rather than seeking how to eliminate or avoid teacher–student conflict in the classroom, students' creativity provides a new perspective on the positive effects of conflict. Therefore, this study has three objectives: (1) we aim to describe and explain the definition of teacher–student conflict in the university classroom; (2) the types of teacher–student conflict are ambiguous; in order to research the positive effect of conflict, we classify three different types of teacher–student conflict in the classroom (understanding conflict, process conflict, and relationship conflict); (3) we aim to determine how different types of teacher–student conflict affect students' creativity.