Creative Capital of Foreign Language Education - ScienceDirect

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ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016) 235 – 239

International Conference on Communication in Multicultural Society, CMSC 2015, 6-8 December 2015, Moscow, Russian Federation

Creative capital of foreign language education – the driving force of knowledge society Marina A. Bogatyreova* National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), Kashirskoe shosse 31, Moscow 115409, Russian Federation

Abstract The paper deals with the production of creative capital in the system of professional foreign language education. The XXI century needs specialists performing effectively in the international interdisciplinary environment. Creativity becomes the producer of tangible and spiritual assets of knowledge society since it is capable of resisting standardized thinking and social risks; turning professional knowledge into the dynamics of action. Pedagogy is faced with the task of designing incentives for the personality to implement its linguistic and creative potential in innovational products. © byby Elsevier Ltd.Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license © 2016 2016The TheAuthors. Authors.Published Published Elsevier (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). Keywords: Linguistic and creative capital; interaction with the international interdisciplinary environment; values; self-control of activities; educational model

1. Introduction 1.1. Axiological values of knowledge society In the era of transnationalization knowledge is regarded to be an intangible asset of society, which constitutes intellectual potential of any organization. The term “intellectual capital” dates back to the 1960-s. Since that time much research has been done. The overview of literature by D. Andriessen (2004) shows the history of intellectual capital movement, which started with the book of H. Itami and was followed by a few publications (Edvinsson and

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1877-0428 © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.12.015

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Marina A. Bogatyreova / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 (2016) 235 – 239

Malone, 1997; Roos, 1997; Stewart, 1997; Sullivan, 2000). In the ХХI century intellectual capital is associated with the source of gaining competitive advantage – a value to be turned into productive force, contributing to the export of state-of-the-art technologies and products of innovative performance. Therefore, interrelations of knowledge with other components of intellectual capital are worth considering from different viewpoints. Information and human knowledge are reported to be integral parts of intellectual capital. N. Bontis (1998) believes that information is just the raw material while knowledge is the finished process. Intellectual capital is therefore the pursuit of effective use of knowledge as opposed to information. What are these intangible assets made up of? M. Joshi and S.D. Ubha (2009, p. 577) uncover the interaction between information and human capital. “Human capital is the collective human competence comprising intelligence, education, skills, experience, intuition and imagination as influenced by emotional and motivational attributes. Apparently, this kind of knowledge exists within the minds of people as well as in the shape of formal information. The latter constitutes those achievements and experiences of individuals that can be documented, communicated and transferred. They include books, papers, studies, reports, software, databases, CDs, and patents. This information becomes independent of its creators once it is documented and communicated. It can be tested objectively for its reliability and validity, and can be also altered, improved and used simultaneously by any number of people”. As to scientific knowledge, it is plunged in culture, interacts with other forms of consciousness and subjectpractical human performance. Being the major producer of material and spiritual assets of society (Yudin, 2006; Gorokhov, 2010; Delokarov, 2010; Karpov, 2013, 2015; Sultanov and Voskresensky, 2014), scientific knowledge marks the transition from economy based on natural resources, to its highest stage – "creative economy", based on human creativity (Sultanov, 2013). Of special value in creative economy is a University graduate, who uses a foreign language (FL) as a tool of mastering a special field of knowledge in real-life and virtual professional communications with representatives of other socio-cultural codes. Today the idea of "an educated person" is replaced by the idea of “a professional intercultural communicator”. Graduates should be experienced to work in the international interdisciplinary environment; they are empowered to take regional decisions in a global context, and vice versa. Therefore, the system of education is faced with the task of developing students’ ability to structure the scientific picture of the world according to their own values and include it in the products of speech-and-mental activity by means of effective strategies. That means that the creative speech phenomenon is embodied in FL communicators’ cultural concepts, motivations, forms of cognitive activity, and updated in the already existing. Capital acquisition takes place at different levels of human’s socialization. As a result of assimilating the intellectual socio-cultural potential of higher education, successful graduates enjoy economic freedom, opportunity to become masters of their destiny. From this viewpoint professional FL education is seen as a process of creative capital production and the most important resource for innovative development of knowledge society (Bogatyreova, 2012). 1.2. Dynamic properties of creative capital In the society of intellectual resources "capitalization", human qualities become an integral part of a specialist’s competence. Traditionally this cognitive tool is assumed as an ease of association, ability to swift thoughts from one direction to the opposite, conjure up and combine imaginable ideas. The emergence of computer technologies and the Internet has accelerated the circulation of information flows. Largely due to it, the production of interdisciplinary knowledge is accompanied by increasing reflexivity, providing a continuous feedback of knowledge from human activities (Gorokhov, 2010; Delokarov, 2010). Psychologists tend to define creativity as a fundamental human property, which can be regretfully lost in the course of socialization (Maslow, 2007). This is probably why A.O. Karpov (2015) posits creativity as an ability to constantly adapt competences to the requirements of the market in its state of high uncertainty – a dynamic category, which relies on a sense of self-prediction of directions in the change of the professional knowledge content. K.V. Sultanov (2013) describes creativity as a trait opposing standardized thinking or rigidly regulated behavior, causing the need to recognize alternatives in situations of uncertainty, remove a conflict that inevitably results from people’s activity. Here the individual's creativity shows as integration of heterogeneous information, and related


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strategies of search and making decision, developing methods of conflict resolution, hypotheses formulation, working out a plan of action in a particular situation. Linguistic and creative thinking (Makshantseva) that manifests itself in FL communication is designed to enrich linguistic notions, formulate new concepts. How do we simulate an educational process? What elements should it contain to intensify the acquisition of social experience and its reproduction in a new capacity by the younger generation? “Competences of personality development” (Khutorskoy, 2002) are included by researchers in the content of FL education. In fact, the practical design of the ontological aspect of any competence is associated with the situational modelling of socio-cultural technologies. That implies working out loose role-play games, contexts, unpredicted situations which satisfy students’ demands in self-realization. V.V. Serikov (1998) and his followers indicate how the individual enters into a situation of cooperation to evaluate his/her position in life, and not just the teacher’s task. So that students could jointly survive true-to-life situations, the structure of the educational environment should include variable components: ideological conflicts, reflexive assessment of taken decisions, experience of puzzling out problems that reveal the meaning of cognition and involve students in analytical activities. Thus, what underlies the process of human capital production is not only a combination of research and subject areas, but also productive communicative activity, integrated with information technologies, whereby theoretical knowledge is assimilated with the help of a FL. That means that linguistic and creative capital is exclusively focused on the consistent transformation of professional knowledge into the dynamics of creative activity. 2. Data and methods 2.1. Interconnection of human activity components Literature review testifies to the heuristic value of the creative resource of specialists in knowledge society. However the underestimation of the humanitarian aspect of professional activities concerned with its reflexive character goes against the philosophy of building knowledge society. Therefore the purpose of the current study is working out a model for the production of the linguistic and creative capital by the personality. It is designated to work for future results and is aimed at developing the individual’s autonomy and self-realization in the course of assimilating knowledge and certain ways of professional interaction with the multicultural environment. It should be borne in mind that it is unlikely to fully solve the problem of modelling creative activity singularly through cognitive procedures, because scientific knowledge is not identical to the assimilation of the world in general and spiritual practice in particular. "Creativity" is genetically different from "ability to execute", because the creative comes from the spiritual and only then from activity; and this spiritual includes different perceptions and thinking processes (Shadrikov, 2002). Besides, the personality is shaped in lifelike relations with the surrounding world which result in a total transformation of its behavior (Leontiev, 1975). The implication is that in their behavior, in judgments and making decisions people come from values that build their coordinate system. Unlike norms, values give us more "degrees of freedom" (Petrovsky, 2010). Productive models developed in science show how individual abilities are shaped – with respect to goal setting, assimilation of blocks of notions, conceptualizing, developing activity-based procedures of reaching goals. In the model proposed by the philosopher V.S. Stepin (2010, p. 38) the elementary human act is presented as the interconnection of several components. They are: (1) the subject of action with his/her goals, knowledge, skills, and values; (2) operations of future-goal activities with the objects included in these operations in specific interactions, and (3) objects of activity. The goal is an ideal image of the future result of the action. The goal answers the question “What?” (what should be obtained as a product of activities). As for the value, it answers the question “What for?” (what sort of demands it is designed to meet). Goals and values are always intertwined, with the value defining the "tree of goals". Upon the whole, V.S. Stepin defines the interaction of all activity components as a certain program defining the internal organization of human performance. The reproduction of these types of activities suggests assimilating certain ways of behavior and communication. Of cardinal importance for professional FL methodology is the author’s belief that the goals play a secondary role with respect to the motivation and intentions of the personality.

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2.2. Development of abilities for autonomous activities How is the content of FL education personified in the professional subject-to subject interaction? Special emphasis in literature is placed on fostering the culture of autonomous learning (Zimmerman and Schunk, 2001; Koryakovtseva, 2002; Boekaerts and Corno, 2005; Abrami et al., 2008). This phenomenon is treated by I.A. Bobykina (2012) as a set of abilities that determine social actors’ success in the multicultural environment: self-employment (motivation, orientation, planning, implementation, monitoring and correction), cognitive and communicative abilities. The technology concerned incorporates three stages. The first stage suggests the formation of positive motivation for self-employment, transition to self-positioning through reflexive self-assessment. The second stage focuses on cultivating FL learners’ cognitive and procedural strategies. The final stage produces a well-rounded educated individual who enjoys exciting opportunities in lifelong FL selfeducation. The author is confident that one of the key ideas of using modelling technologies in the educational process is their internal harmony at the operational level with the student’s individual strategy, which creates a psychologically comfortable setting, so that higher quality results are achieved. Taking into account the fact that the structure of the personal experience largely determines the vector, the content and intensity of interaction with the professional intercultural environment, it is essential that FL teachers facilitate the process of adaptation: organize a cooperative reflexive assessment of students’ abilities to use mechanisms of self-education, autonomous methods while creating innovative products. 3. Discussion of results Thus, in the course of the study we used a method of describing scientific concepts as well as a prognostic method for modelling professional activities. Scientific achievements allow to conclude, that despite the difference in the contents and logic of structuring the models, the authors are united by the same idea: creative capital is of global value, filtered through individual consciousness, and is reproduced in the dialogue of man with the phenomena of culture and contemporaries. Thereby, it turns into a tool of creating knowledge economy – economy with a human face. The findings are supported by the idea that the owner of creativity unifies and streamlines disparate information, generates ideas and exchanges human capital in the course of cross-cultural communication. Following selfdesigned trajectories in FL education creative personalities rely on their inner potential and self-strategies to deal with the trying situations of uncertainty or lack of information. By using the results of the research we can build a process of linguistic and creative capital production as a selfeducational model (see Fig. 1).

Levels:

Motivational

Value orientation

Operational

Productive

Interaction with interdisciplinary environment, dialogic cognition of theoretical knowledge in real-life situations, reflexive assessment of the competence

Production of innovative speech product

Fig. 1. Self-educational model of linguistic and creative capital production in high school.

Motivational level: value orientation. The prior level is characterized by the prediction of the future result in line with the professed values and axiological meanings, definition of objectives. Motivation to learn comes from the individuals’ deep incentives to boost their ego. FL learners seek to find out what cultural beliefs and attitudes in


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particular are going to become the backbone of their life and creativity. They fix thematic interests, which determine the internal organization of their various activities for the near future. Operational level: operations of transforming initial professional knowledge. At the second level, the FL learner conceptualizes scientific and language pictures of the world to become the owner of the individual linguistic intelligence. These are the operations that actualize content, meaning and values of interdisciplinary knowledge to be included in the interaction with internal / external environment with the help of language and cognitive strategies. It’s just in real situations of social communication that under-graduates can develop reflexive skills and assess their competency and speech behavior. Production level: generating educational products as a valuable resource of society. The third level involves testing the ways of self-realization, generating culturally significant results of speech-and-mental activities. Due to accumulated behavioral skills and intellectual strategies, graduates gain understanding of how to establish themselves in the multicultural environment, to solve problems of any complexity using a FL. The form of selfcultivating professional FL competence, reproduced in the collective process, turns into a social form of collaboration. It must be added that the degree of approximation to the ideal model depends largely on the teacher’s experience and proficiency. Students should be invited to such a type of communication in the classroom that would enable them to maximize their autonomy, activate their creative potential. It is the teacher who starts the mechanisms of self-organization going, and it is the teacher who evaluates graduates’ capacity to rely on autonomous methods in their future productive activities. 4. Conclusion Overall, the concept of creative capital can be traced back to the works of economists who consider human intellect to produce tangible and intangible assets of knowledge society. The range of problems concerned with the linguistic and creative capital production in High School is extremely vast. Nowadays “nurturing” bright individuals is the prerogative of not only teachers but also students. It involves the development of autonomous methods of organizing their own activities and readiness to navigate nonstandard situations in the era of crises; take responsible and informed decisions in various contexts which are perceived by professionals in terms of certain coordinate values that influence their choice of alternative actions. The research provides an educational model based on the concepts of a) human intellect production; b) interconnection of human activity components; c) personality development; d) modelling the process of selfeducation. This theoretically grounded model is feasible because it implies creative autonomy of different categories of FL learners. It would be beneficial for FL teachers to design loose true-to-life situations, where students could manifest their resourcefulness, creativity, and scientific imagination. Suggestions for future work include developing and classifying reflexive strategies that build new ways of speech behavior and boost mechanisms of selforganization in the conflict-like cross-cultural environment. References Andriessen, D. (Ed.). (2004). Making sense of intellectual capital – designing a method for valuation of intangibles. MA, USA: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Bobykina, I.A. (2012). Concept of fostering the culture of autonomous learning in high school [abstract from thesis]. Nizhny Novgorod. Bogatyreova, M.A. (2012). Economic component of reforms in the sphere of higher FL education. Innovations in Science: ХII Scientific and Practical Conference in Novosibirsk (ed. J.A. Polonsky), pp. 91-104. Bontis, N. (1998). Intellectual capital: an exploratory study that develops measures and models. Management Decision, 36(2), 63-76. Joshi, M., and Ubha, S.D. (2009). Intellectual capital disclosures. Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 7(5), 575-582. Karpov, A.O. (2015). Fundamental structure and prospects for education research as a problem of philosophical science [thesis]. Moscow. Serikov, V.V. (1998). Personality oriented education – search of a new paradigm. Moscow. Stepin, V.S. (2011). Civilization and culture. Classics of humanitarian thinking. St. Petersburg: SpbGPU. Sultanov K.V. (2013). Creative capital as the basis for modernization of educational practices. Philosophy of Law, 5(60), 79-83.