The Giftedness Project (1): Popular conceptions of giftedness

I’ve been working for about a year on my new research project, on representations and constructions of child giftedness in the late 20th/ early 21st century, principally in the US and the UK. I thought it could be interesting to write a few blog posts about the central aspects of what I’m researching and why.

‘I’m looking at child giftedness and how it’s perceived by people‘. It’s funny how this research topic triggers immediate enthusiasm and interest in both academics and non-academics I talk to. Generally, as a researcher, you’re more used to blank stares when you mention your research field. But everyone, it seems, has something to say about giftedness; anecdotes about gifted children, strong opinions regarding Gifted & Talented schemes, rants about parents of gifted children, etc.

‘Gifted children’ in their natural environment

I’m very interested to hear what people have to say when they react directly to my subject of research, because often it confirms what the literature says about ‘theories of giftedness’ - popular assumptions held about giftedness, which structure the experiences of children identified as ‘gifted’ and the way we react to them:

Firstly, we tend to assume that there is such a thing as giftedness. In other words,  giftedness is seen as a fairly tangible, measurable thing and gifted children are the children who possess that thing.
Secondly, we tend to think that, to a very large extent, giftedness is innate – either hereditary or inborn.

This double assumption is very common, and its pervasiveness in popular understandings of the term has been repeatedly demonstrated by researchers. However, this ‘theory of giftedness’, while it was once held to be true, is not anymore; at least not by most gifted education specialists and certainly not by sociologists of education.

Firstly, giftedness is not a pre-existing category nor an objective quality but a social construct, based on a number of historical, (sometimes pseudo-)scientific, educational and cultural norms, and it is connected to other constructs such as ‘intelligence’, ‘creativity’, ‘potential’ and ‘success’, not to mention ‘the child’, none of which ‘objective’.

The notion of giftedness is dependent on sociocultural values of a given place and time, because whatever a society chooses to value (and calls, for instance, ‘intelligence’) will define what it chooses to label ‘giftedness’, and how it addresses ‘it’ educationally. In one society, artistic ‘talent’ might be held in great esteem, while in another scientific skills might be seen as more desirable. An ‘all-rounder’ child may be an ideal in some places, while in others we may prefer highly specialized individuals. Leadership, physical prowess and social skills could perfectly – and according to certain classifications, do – form part of a sociocultural definition of giftedness.

Extraordinary moustaches may be part of one society’s definition of giftedness

Secondly, and as a result, the notion that giftedness is ‘inborn’ is hugely problematic. It is quite fruitless to quibble over whether children are ‘naturally’ gifted if giftedness is mostly a social construction. We can get into debates about original ‘dispositions’ or ‘abilities’, but at the end of the day a ‘gifted child’ is a child who scores highly on a given society’s conception of giftedness, according to specific measurements designed for that purpose.

How highly? Well, again, it depends. In a society where the top 10% of children according to a chosen measure are identified as gifted (for example, the US), more people will ‘be’ gifted than in another society where the exact same measurement is used, but only the top 1% are deemed to deserve the label. The next few are not ‘secretly gifted’, they just aren’t gifted. If they moved to the US, though, they would be gifted.

So when we talk about ‘identifying’ gifted children, the term ‘identification’ is dodgy, if not incorrect. On the surface, it sounds like trying to ‘identify’ something we just found on the ground, like a flower or an insect, with reference to some kind of well-established taxonomy. It isn’t like that; the ‘scientific’ aspects of giftedness (measurement, ‘identification’, etc.) are structured by the social and cultural construction of the concept. And in the process, ideological problems arise.

Because what surfaces again and again is that such measurements tend to favour – surprise, surprise – children who are already favoured by happy accidents of birth: in the US and the UK, mostly white, middle-class children, with more boys than girls. For most of the 20th century, ‘giftedness’ measurements (mostly in the form of IQ testing) were taken to be objective, and therefore the fact that ‘gifted children’ were overwhelmingly white middle-class boys was seen as further evidence that the ruling-class was were it was for a good reason.

See also the convenient educational myth that the ‘cream always rises to the top’

Popular conceptions of giftedness as ‘objective’ and ‘innate’ are therefore a big issue because they conceal the constructedness of the concept and indirectly normalise the idea that, if it turns out that the gifted kids are also the ones of the most powerful social groups, well, ‘that’s that’. They are also very good at legitimising curent power structures and at defending ‘meritocracy’.

So part of my project involves looking at texts – from the scientific literature, from educational manuals, from non-fiction, from literature, from policy documents etc – which either reinforce or attempt to deconstruct these popular understandings of giftedness. I am trying to understand, in particular, why these conceptions seem to spread so easily among parents, teachers, children, even researchers themselves sometimes. I’m particularly interested in the links between these conceptions and class – and therefore, social reproduction.

My view, it must be noted, is on the extreme end of the spectrum of the social constructedness of giftedness; in other words, I’m extremely doubtful that there is any reality at all to the idea that some children are simply ‘born with’ ‘objective’ qualities that predispose them to such and such task that (lucky them!) happen to be socially valued. This view is not shared by all researchers, particularly not by all researchers in the psychology of child giftedness, a field agitated for the past 20 years by interesting debates around this question.