Introduction. In this article, the thematic strategy is intended for both educatees and educators as participants of intercultural dialogue. First, it represents a unity of methodological and conceptual refinements designed to facilitate and intensify thinking and awareness of the need to make decisions about the application of a variety of pedagogical knowledge responsive to the profound changes in our ever-changing world. Second, it involves a categorical stance that helps describe the mental process involved in rationalising arrangements for educational experience and their connections to intuitions and research intentions, leading to ideas about objects for generating a specific research topic.

In implementing this strategy, the aim is to strengthen the synergies between student scholarly endeavor, especially in the master’s programme, ideation activity and pedagogical or teaching performance – with a student-centred approach – through the means of cognitive learning and considering the psychological and linguistic factors enabled in language and culture education. Our understanding of ideation as thinking about and producing new ideas on the basis of the educational experiences makes the case for examining ideation issues in pedagogy. Ideating is of current interest in the development of creative thinking to support students’ general academic background. The full validity and importance of this process can be seen in the realisation of the stance of viewing the object of research or ideation as a multi-dimensional yet holistic phenomenon. The relevance of the topic of this paper lies in the fact that it offers instructional practices that encourage students to activate their actual skills, awaken potential capacities in the initial stages of research activity, and engender novel insights into the formation of scientific research apparatuses and into their reflection in the final thesis.

The scope of the paper’s methodological, systematic findings remains limited to clarifying the question of the practicality of applying these theoretical premises to the mostly implicit or latent teaching of intercultural communication students in academic seminars or on a case-by-case basis. We look upon this kind of communication for what it is: part of an intercultural dialogue which “is understood as a process that comprises an open and respectful exchange of views between individuals and groups with different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds and heritage, on the basis of mutual understanding and respect” (White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, 2008: 17).

One of the strategic principles for developing or enhancing students’ operational actions of initiating and constructing/refining a research idea of interculturality to embody it in a dissertation text is the reliance on the act of idea generation and the attitude of acquiring the ability to direct it in the course of decision making.

The purpose of the article, in this context, is to provide a categorical understanding of how ideation and its “ideative” patterns of interpreting reality in the intentional act interact with academic goals, factored in the perspective of tools to engage students in intentional learning. In doing so, we assume that ideation is part of the multicyclic process of idea generation and implementation to optimise the selection and understanding of research objects and the delineation of research perspectives.

Materials and research methods. In educational methodology, idea generation must go to a level of awareness and knowledge organisation. As a single loop, it inserts itself between the telic state and conceptualisation. The telic state is the thought process, so to speak, when tacit assumptions or self-consistent courses of action give rise to the establishment of a research goal. Conceptualisation refers to the creation of a thesis conception, a concept, that is, when the identified or categorized idea finds a verbal expression. Thus, logical analysis and interpretive case study become the main methods in the development of the designated category, while the methodological approach to the integration of this category in pedagogical practice must provide for manipulation with the cognitive consciousness of students. The material of the study was the analytical data of practical work on various sources of cultural heritage with master students of the Tunisian language higher education institution, i.e., in a Muslim audience, studying in the field of “intercultural communication” in Russian.

Theoretical basis and methodology. The idea as a phenomenon established in the twentieth century in the philosophical theory of E. Husserl (Husserl, 2014), but also existed before in scientific researches, especially by G. Romanes (Romanes, 1898) in the context of human mental development in comparison with the peculiarities of animal thinking, is increasingly becoming a concept, the study of which can bring us closer to explaining the way ideas are generated in psychological, linguistic and cultural terms, and determine its methodological significance for the development of intercultural communication competence and cognitive functioning in academic activity.

It is worth noting that competence is the ability to “self-actualize,” if one follows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In general, he limited the concept of self-actualization to older people because “youngsters have not yet achieved identity” (Maslow, 1954: xx) and manifested it through the tendency to growth in conjunction with the theory of motivation, full humanity, fuller use of species and personal potentials. In our opinion, this can characterise the effect of self-confidence and self-activity for a young researcher in the pursuit of knowledge and qualified communication adaptation.

In this sense, intercultural communication competencies must reveal knowledge and awareness of the actual communication competence (including language skills and cultural intelligence or culture-bound cognitive styles) and readiness for agility in case of specific skill bottlenecks in challenging situations when interacting with a personality from a different language and culture. Our view of intercultural communication competencies corresponds to a common definition, which in different variations can be found in most of the academic works: “Intercultural competencies in essence are about improving human interactions across difference, whether within a society (differences due to age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ethnicity, and so on) or across borders” (Deardorff, 2020: 5). In order to communicate interculturally and to carry out linguistic and intercultural research, the student must face the use and refinement of the target language as a cultural channel that allows him/her to fit into an environment with identical values, not alien to cultural diversity and dialog between civilizations.

The cognitive functions, in turn, can be related to C. Jung’s scientific view of the conscious and unconscious, which led to the essential analysis of the “psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person's judgment” (Jung, 2017: ix). The famous psychiatrist distinguished “a thinking, a feeling, a sensation, and an intuitive type” and assigned psychological functions to each of these types. They “may moreover be either introverted or extraverted, depending on its relation to the object” (Jung, 2017: 6), among which “the unconscious functions ... group themselves in patterns correlated with the conscious ones” (Jung, 2017: 374). Equivalent to the understanding of cognitive functions are the works of A. Luria (Luria, 1973; 1976), who arrived at his theory of the dynamic systemic localization of brain functions based on cultural history. Jung’s ideas of the psychology of consciousness from a clinical point of view, the cognitive disorder and Luria’s three-block model of cerebral organisation (the block that regulates the general and selective activation level of the brain – the block that receives, processes, and stores modality-specific information – the block that programmes, regulates the course of mental function, which enables the formation of activity motives and control over activity outcomes), by definition found its development in the cognitive paradigm of scientific thought, particularly in cognitive psychology (Das et al., 1996; Das, 2009), neurolinguistics (Chernigovskaya & Deglin, 1986; The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics, 2019; Geach, 2001), cognition (Benjafield et al., 2010), cognitive linguistics (The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 2007; Vyvyan, 2007), educational psychology (Languis & Miller, 1992; McBride & Cutting, 2019; Weber & Skirbekk, 2014; Lövdén et al., 2020), etc. The importance of awareness of the problems of functioning of the cognitive area of the individual for pedagogical purposes lies in the possibility of using techniques to control memory, attention, linguistic abilities, perceptual acts, logical thinking, creativity, but also research behaviour (including the epistemic point) as a form of creativity and ideation as the creative process of generating new ideas, teaching and learning as a whole, and adaptability, resilience in coping with global events and changing, in the present case, academic circumstances.

Interpretations of ideation have varied and will continue to vary, as is typical of scientific knowledge, since it is subject to change. However, rather than attempting to consider all viewpoints, we should limit ourselves to those definitions that have characteristics relevant to revealing the nature and functionality of ideation in the context of the present study. Psychologically, ideative content is an adjunct of the “dynamic system” (Zinchenko, 2010: 225) and ideation is interpreted as an arbitrary operation involving images (representations) of stimuli that are not actually perceived, i.e., without visual perception of things. In this sense, ideation correlates with the concept of noema, the object or content of thought.

Research Results and Discussion. Ideation can be seen as a mental act of forming ideas, i.e., concepts, based on the contemplative, direct or mediated level of understanding things. Direct contemplation (roughly, “What I see is what I say”) corresponds to the concept of intuition; mediated or essential contemplation refers to perception in general, with the understanding of the logical meaning of things, through reasoning.

Following the foundations of G. Romanes (Romanes, 1898: 67-69), we can rightly assume that imagination has a generic and a conceptual character. A generic character of imagination defines the capacity for simple categorization of objects that does not require the involvement of consciousness or intentional generalization. In this context, classification at such a level is related to or congruent with intuitive processes of inference, whereby the identification of the object with a particular genus or class is based on similarity. The conceptual character of the formation of ideas arises from the ability to classify objects when the features of similarity between them merge and an image is formed in consciousness in the form of an intentional abstraction. Generic ideas are the product of an unintentional grouping or an unconscious imagination. Concepts are formations of conscious ideas that arise from the construction of complex relationships between objects and their conscious grouping. Intentional grouping is the higher stage of generalization in ideation processes when symbols and signs replace ideas. It is associated with the formation of concepts and their expression in linguistic form. Logic is basically considered as a form of idea formation, but intuitive act is also applied to this form of idea formation.

From this point of view, there are two types of idea formation and sometimes two stages. These are non-conscious and conscious thought processes. The first shows the non-intentionality of classification features, which is the lowest degree of abstraction, and the second marks the intentionality and the higher degree of abstraction, i.e., conceptualisation, which is inconceivable without embodiment in a symbol, primarily a verbal sign or a word, as it concerns personality or the human factor in general, including learners.

Thus, when speaking of human, a true phenomenon of the cultural is evoked. In the vector sequence “man – word” – “word – culture,” the word, which is the “core of human culture” (Zinchenko, 2010: 487), acts as a kind of link between man and culture, defining man simultaneously as an individual and as a bearer of culture. At this point, it should be noted that this position is not the same as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1939), which generally states that the world as we know it, and thus thinking, is largely shaped by the language of our culture. It is also worth specifying that it refers instead to the word, first as the unit of the semantic system of language, and second as the verbal unit of the conceptual object (idea or concept) that is culturally receptive to language. The semantic system is considered from the typological aspect (Zalizniak, 2013) in order to identify the regularities of word function for successful intercultural communication. The conceptual objects (for us a subject of cognitive linguistics) correspond roughly to the conceptual elements of R. Jackendoff, the characterisation of which within the conceptual semantics helps people to better understand the meaning of words and sentences (Jackendoff, 1976: 89-91). Thus, the word consolidating the “man – culture” system takes up a stronger role in the cognitive function of natural language.

In the cycle of idea generation together with the establishment of parameters for an object that initiates, so to speak, the constructible concept, which through its constituent analysis receives the content contours of the future linguistic sign, ideation is, as it were, a bridge to the “frame alignment” of the conceptual category, schematization, the formative recovery of the idea or conceptualisation. The ideative object (the object to which the mind can refer through ideation) or the practically generated idea crystallizes at the level of conceptualisation into an entirely new product as compared to an idea or concept. Considering the philosophical view of F. Brentano that “there is no act of thinking without an object that is thought” (Brentano, 2009: 68), we believe that the ideative object or the object to which our mind is directed in the process of ideation is the object in the unfolding of thought. Both phenomena, namely ideation and conceptualisation, are central to intercultural communication education and the preparation of students for conceptualisation in linguistic and cultural studies.

Concept is a well-developed theoretical notion. We intend to adequately perceive its multidimensional content while specifying substantive aspects of its treatment: cognitive, cultural, linguistic.

The following definition can be considered irrefutable with regard to the cognitive aspect: “The fundamental unit of knowledge central to categorisation and conceptualisation. Concepts inhere in the conceptual system, and from early in infancy are redescribed from perceptual experience through a process termed perceptual meaning analysis. This process gives rise to the most rudimentary of concepts known as an image schema. Concepts can be encoded in a language-specific format known as the lexical concept. While concepts are relatively stable cognitive entities they are modified by ongoing episodic and recurrent experiences” (Vyvyan, 2007: 31).

Yu. Stepanov gives the concept another – cultural – dimension and calls it, so to speak, a clot of culture in a person’s mind, in the form of which culture enters a person’s mental world. On the other hand, a concept is something through which a person (a normal, ordinary person, not a creator of cultural values) himself enters culture and, in some cases, is influenced by it (Stepanov, 1997: 40).

The strictly linguistic aspect of the term ascribes to it the semantic content of the concept, the scope of which is the subject (denotation) of this concept (Zherebilo, 2010), i.e., in abstraction from the features that make the concept a fact of culture (Stepanov, 1997). Here, as seen, the term forms the semantic core, the meaning of the concept. Moreover, as already mentioned, the concept is associated with a linguistic sign. That is, the concept specified in a word, or a combination of words is given a linguistic expression.

In terms of practical needs, we assess the meaning of the concept as the most important unit of intercultural communication, which combines all these meanings in a single concept, the intention of which is to generate and organize communication in a system of cultural interaction. At the same time, concepts are culturally determined outcomes. In this regard, according to the holistic approach to culture, the concept definition is derived from the epistemic or objective certainty – according to experts – about the unity of the name (word, collocation) and the associated open set of subjective representations that depend on the “observers,” the participants of communication (Zinchenko et al., 2016: 50-51).

Nevertheless, we cannot but take the concept as a subject of discussion when exploring intercultural communication through coursework with elements of literary and art historical analysis based on works of literature and visual arts with results in independent research at the master’s level, and we cannot but pay attention to the specifics of approaching it with a foundation of appropriate materials and content.

This material is a resource for students to develop ideas and grapple with concepts. They appear to be individual concepts but carry a universal meaning in that they contain the idea of the divine, which is spiritually close to everyone, regardless of whether it is identical, similar, or different in its symbolism in different religions. The creation of concepts is a unique talent when they acquire an eminently universal cultural value. Concepts, then, represent symbols created by a genius (poet, writer, artist, researcher) that convey a segment of co-knowledge (co-awareness) at the level of revelation or intrusion into being. Here we call the actor of conceptualisation a genius not by chance, but because, as Wassily Kandinsky said (Kandinsky, 2018: 59), the innate feeling of the artist is that evangelical talent that cannot be hidden in a napkin. This reference contains a remarkable attitude towards art, implying the spiritual gift of the painter, whose work is part of the package of research objects in common with the works of Edvard Munch (composition “The Scream”) and Ivan Bunin (story “The Cry”), to name but one example.

In a pictorial work, just as in the written word, concepts are born, expressed in symbols of figurative language and verbally confirmed or encoded, on numerous occasions in naming units, or visualized. A symbol appears in the art of declamation or painting. Symbol-generating impulses may, in fact, be excited by primary elements of knowledge. Such particulars refer to essences of different order. For Bunin, as for Munch, it was the impression of hearing a scream that made the blood run cold as ice. For Kandinsky it was the experience of a revelation of the senses.

A concept is a symbolic representation of a conscious, cognized (not naive) ideative object in all its forms, which conveys a segment of co-consciousness, in some cases at the level of the unconscious or at the level of the primary elements of knowledge conditioned by the non-relative environment.

Munch himself was tolerant of all kinds of readings of his brainchild (Prideaux, 2012: 166-167). The author’s mind is only a prerequisite for such interpretations and conjectures on a larger scale. In academic discourse, however, giving new meaning to a painting or an individual image is not a goal in itself. The task is simple and consists in awakening the desire to think about an ideative or conceptual object that evokes categorical associations. The latter are in the nature of semantically mediated associations. Finding appropriate associations helps students train semantic memory while promoting its development and is thus involved in the reinforcement of conscious experience. Moreover, categorical associations are definitely enriched by the emotional value in the thinking process.

Kandinsky’s series of paintings, in which every picture bears the same title, namely “Composition”[1], expands the meaning of the concept of composition itself by endowing it with an artistic idea and taking it to the highest level of generalization, abstraction within abstraction or “pure abstraction” (Kandinsky, 2018: 97).

It takes a special gift of vision to depict images that hide conceptual meanings behind a seemingly disorderly set of colours and non-geometrically “measured” reliefs. For example, when discussing the artist’s ideas in the paintings of “Composition VII”, the thesis advisor must point out several semantic reference points that will help students understand this idea and form a judgment. First of all, the student’s attention should be drawn to the nodal point or nodal object of the painting, which conveys in its cry all the terror or fear of the elements that have invaded it. The hyperlink[2] will give students an insight into this, where we find Kandinsky’s explanation of the painting's plot: the resurrection from the dead, the Last Judgment, the Flood, and the Garden of Eden. The images of the Last Judgment described in the Qur'anic verses are associated with this composition image: “On that day they blow the Horn, and on that day We will gather the sinners blue” (Sura 20, Ayat 102); “Who, I hope, will forgive my sin on the Day of Recompense” (Sura 26, Ayat 82); “Make me one of the heirs of the Garden of Bliss!” (Sura 26, Ayat 85). Here, of course, we can turn to the Bible, but given the specifics of the educational environment and Kandinsky's interest in Arab and particularly Tunisian culture, we look for dots of meaning in the Qur'anic text that are consistent with the artist’s idea.

Bunin’s cry traces the whole desperate and tolerance-obsessed fate of an old Muslim who has lost a son named Yusuf. And here it is not difficult for a student to imagine the suffering of the father, a figure from the Qur'an (Sura 12 “Josef”).

All of this cultural information, presented in visual and verbal language, stimulates the student’s mental activity and serves to develop the object’s ideative content.

The attitudinal formation of the ideating cognitive factors has an impact on the teaching of monological forms of utterance. As such, this precept falls within the theory on the mechanisms of speech activity, and the provision of methodological educational facilities for the performance of a monological speech act confirms its practical effect. L. Dubinina describes the exercise apparatus with a clear emphasis on the development of the ability to form a monologue, i.e., a system of facilities or sufficient means, a “system of systems,” a “database” from which any type of exercise can be taken (Dubinina, 2014: 21). More specifically, prediction, construction, extension, search, and association exercises can be developed to meet our need to develop factors at two intermittent levels. The first factors are cognition factors: creating hypotheses, axiomatic statements, and distinguished symbols, retrieving semantic associations. The second level involves factors for modelling cultural dynamics: creating conflict and moving to dialogue construction with analysis of identity patterns, representation of acculturation, cultural diffusion, and issues of integration at the centre.

In the present work, patterns for the teacher’s indicative activity are proposed in order to promote students’ ability to ideate within the framework of interculturality, that is, to form ideas about the object of research and to interpret generated conceptions in relation to cultural representations. The teacher’s actions and the students’ counteractions are shown schematically in Table.