Abstract:

Creative educational paradigm is a perspective model to be implemented in a multicultural society. “Creative education” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1936. L. Vigotsky stressed out the role of creativity in learning in his book “Imagination and creativity in childhood”. Imagination, creativity and multilingualism/ culturalism are intricately connected. Although research shows that multicultural experience influences creative abilities through personal characteristics and motivation, cognitive variables were not thoroughly investigated within this framework. That is why we refer to structured imagination, which is defined as a cognitive ability to produce categorically based images, that are influenced by concepts in mind and developed within the cultural influence, existing knowledge and memory, in order to find the predictive relations among multilingualism and creativity. This study explores moderation effects of Big 5 personality traits and mediation effects of structured imagination on the influence of multilingualism on creativity in order to focus on the importance of developing creativity and social and emotional skills for children in everyday curriculum. Three hundred and fifty participants (aged 18-45 years) completed the Ward’s test of structured imagination, the Plurilingual Pluricultural Competence scale, The shortened Russian version of Ten Item Personality Inventory-RU (TIPI), and Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. Models are tested using structured equation modeling, the confirmatory factor analysis, carried out with the R package lavaan. We hypothesize that participants with higher scores on the Plurilingual Pluricultural Competence test also achieve better results in a creativity test and produce more unique pictures in a Ward’s structured imagination test. Thus, multilingual and multicultural experience contributes to creativity. Contribution is mediated by structured imagination and moderated by personality traits. On a practical level it means that personal characteristics influence multilingual and multicultural potential and creative performance potential. The more open to new experience you are, the stronger knowledge of different languages and cultures affects creative ability through expanding standard and typical solutions with the unique and original ones. Therefore, the more creative you become. Thus the research fulfills the aim of presenting the empirical evidence in support of the creative educational paradigm and the implementation of multilingual and multicultural practices in education.

Keywords:

Multilingualism / culturalism, personality traits, socio-emotional skills, soft skills assessment, structured imagination.