Students with Learning disabilities are a unique minority in regular school setting in Nigeria, as such they often obstructed by partial or total delay in one aspect of learning development or the other. This paper discusses the impact of English language of teacher creativity on students with learning disabilities achievement in essay writing in Oyo State Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was used to select seven government owned schools in seven towns within Ibadan, Nigeria. Eighteen (18) English Language subject teachers in Junior Secondary Schools II were enumerated while seven (7) intact classes of Juniors Secondary School II of students with learning disabilities totaling five hundred and eighty-five (585) were purposively selected for research purpose through nomination by the class teachers based on the academic records of each students in their classes across the seven schools. Two validated research instruments were used: Teacher Creativity Rating Scale (r=0.83); Essay Writing Achievement Test (r=0.72). Two research questions were raised and answered. The findings revealed that teacher creativity has a great influence on students’ achievement in essay writing. The researcher then recommended that teacher of English language courses should make use of creative skills effectively during teaching/learning process, most especially in essay writing.
According to the enactivist view of the mind, there is close connection between being alive and being cognitive: to be alive is to be capable of cognitive engagements. The living organism does not passively receive and process stimuli from an external world, but rather helps to determine what counts as useful information on the basis of its structure, needs, and the way that it is structurally coupled with its surroundings. Sense-making is the process whereby it interprets environmental stimuli in reference to its survival needs. However, gauging meaning and significance in a complex social world such as ours goes well beyond mere survival and self-maintenance, and has much to do with adapting and faring well in a specific socio-cultural context. The achievement of human goals requires coordinated movement, which leads to the formation of built-up patterns of engagement and response. Over time, these characteristic patterns of movement and behavior become more engrained and come to comprise an individual’s habitual manner of sense-making. Learning and socialization play a significant role, and habits of mind are formed via interaction with values, cultural norms, and other people. Once habits form and become more engrained, there is a sense in which social norms are internalized and sedimented in the body. Cognition and affectivity therefore are best seen as socially embedded and heavily modulated by relationships and norms. This environmental influence can either (i) cultivate adaptive habits of mind that promote human flourishing, or (ii) contribute to maladaptive habits of mind that alienate people from deep-rooted human needs and interfere with overall well-being. One setting in which habits of mind are profoundly modulated is the college or university. Inside higher educational institutions guided by neoliberal ideology, individuals are habituated to toxic interaction patterns and modes of valuation. Rather than cultivating critical thinking and promoting self-realization, these institutions often undermine such capacities. College and university settings in contemporary neoliberal democracies such as the United States thereby give us a powerful example of how social institutions sometimes serve to cultivate habits of mind that impede human flourishing.
This article introduces the special issue of Review of General Psychology on “The Next Big Ideas in Psychology.” We provide a brief background, explaining how the special issue arose from a 2024 conference of the same name, sponsored by APA Division 1, the Society for General Psychology and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Then we present a brief summary of each of the nine articles in the special issue.
