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Introducing Bilingual Creative Education to the UAE school curriculum
This chapter picks up on a widely discussed topic in both multilingualism and creativity research that comes from pedagogical considerations. The research conducted by the author over last 10 years has delivered a solid argument that speaking more than one language facilitates an individual’s creative capacities. The author has expanded the scope of his research and implemented these findings in education. His new approach includes teaching strategies from both fields, a unified Bilingual Creative Education program. It aims at facilitation of the overall linguistic, intellectual, and creative competences of young children regardless of their intellectual and creative predispositions thereby meeting the recommendations of a number of governmental policies. It is designed for both migrants who speak their native language and attempt to acquire the language of the migration country and autochthones who want to acquire a foreign language simultaneously with their mother tongue. The purpose of the program is to introduce students to a school curriculum in two languages and to foster four defining aspects of creativity: novelty, utility, aesthetics, and authenticity. To accomplish this goal, the program utilizes the holistic approach, which combines cognitive, personal, and environmental factors in education. This approach implicates five essential educational attributes: personal, cognitive, administrative, contextual, and curricular.