Drawing on Dewey's pragmatic perspective on talent cultivation and previous research on promoting employee creativity in industry, this study investigates student creativity performance in relation to teacher's encouragement, intrinsic motivation, and creative process engagement. Based on survey data collected from 140 vocational high school students who participated in a nation‐wide contest in Taiwan, path analyses were performed using structure equation modeling techniques. The results indicate that both teacher's encouragement and intrinsic motivation have a significant, although indirect, effect on student creativity, and that creative process engagement, as opposed to teacher encouragement or intrinsic motivation, has a direct and significant mediating effect on student creativity. This finding is in partial agreement with prior research which reports student creativity is positively associated with teacher encouragement and intrinsic motivation, highlighting the mediating role of creative process engagement in facilitating student creative performance.