[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Today we’re going to talk about a topic that was actually requested by the members of my Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership. They wanted to understand how to support gifted children and I have to say it initially made me feel uneasy, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. Perhaps it had something to do with the episode I did a year ago on White privilege in schools where I interviewed Dr. Allison Roda and we discussed how gifted and talented programs in New York City, where Dr. Roda works and studies, primarily benefit middle-class White students. But despite this, I went into the research with an open mind. What happens if giftedness really is a thing, and it’s just that programs, as they’re defined and used in schools, are broken?  And it turned out that that question really got to the heart of the two things I want to look at in this episode. Before we get into that, I just wanted to remind you of two things: firstly that the You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop is getting started this Monday, September 13^th.  If you want to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning -whether you’re homeschooling or they’re in school – the workshop will help you to start using your child’s interests as a jumping-off point to deep, authentic, self-driven learning that will be so much more fun and memorable than curriculum-based learning that doesn’t interest them, and that they end up resisting. You’ll get one short email each day with an activity to do that doesn’t take a ton of time, and you’ll also join a private Facebook community where you can learn from and with all the other parents in the workshop too. You’ll come out of it with a sense of confidence that you really can do this – that you can get the skills and tools you need to support your child’s intrinsic love of learning, and it can actually be interesting and fun for both of you. You can sign up for the free workshop at yourparentingmojo.com/bestteacher. Jen Lumanlan 02:38 And the second reminder is that the Supporting Your Child’s Learning membership is open for enrollment in just one week, on Saturday, September 18^th.  I’m doing two things for the first time with this membership: this is the first time that I’m offering sliding scale pricing on this membership. And secondly, I’m also offering the option to come into the membership for two weeks for FREE. You can come in and see the first two modules of content, and join our private community that isn’t on Facebook, and attend an orientation call to help you access all of the materials and see how it can work for you, and join a peer coaching group if you like, and even a group coaching call with me. At the end of the two weeks, if you decide that the membership just doesn’t fit your needs, you can cancel at no cost.  If you decide you love it, we’ll bill you for whichever of the sliding scale pricing options fits your budget at the end of the two weeks.  So, there’s literally no risk to join – you get to experience the entire membership which is completely designed to help you go beyond you are your child’s best teacher workshop and truly support your child’s intrinsic love of learning, and you get to make that decision based on actually experiencing it, not on what you can glean about it from an information page.  So, if you want to sign up, you can do it starting on Saturday, September 18^th, and our two weeks gets started after enrollment closes on Thursday, September 30^th.  If you have any questions about the membership, just reach out to support@yourparentingmojo.com and we’ll get right back to you. Jen Lumanlan 03:56 OK, let’s talk about giftedness. Firstly, what is giftedness? How can we define it? And from there, how can we support gifted children effectively? Let’s start with the definition, and then we’ll move into support. Our view of what giftedness is has shifted quite a bit over time. Francis Galton was one of the first people to study the concept of genius in a book called Hereditary Genius published in 1869.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he studied the family lineage of distinguished European men and concluded that genius must be genetically inherited. Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed a scale to identify students in need of alternative education in 1916, although many of the items they tested – things like eyesight, hearing, color sense, height, and weight seem more like they are testing for an optimal view of masculinity than anything related to intelligence.  Lewis Terman adapted Binet’s scale to create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which viewed giftedness as a single entity, measured through this Intelligence Quo tient, or IQ test.  A score above 135 indicates someone is ‘moderately gifted,’ 150 indicates ‘exceptionally gifted,’ and above 180 indicates ‘severely and/or profoundly gifted.’  The problems with the IQ test and other standardized tests are well known.  Students who don’t identify as White may not be accustomed to answering questions simply for the purpose of sharing knowledge when there isn’t a real problem to solve may perform poorly on pencil-and-paper tasks conducted in settings that they may find intimidating, may miss cultural references in the test questions, have learning or cognitive styles that are different from White students, have low academic motivation or engagement when they are being assessed, and have test anxiety or suffer from stereotype threat.  Stereotype threat arises when you remind someone of a specific aspect of their identity that’s in conflict with the thing being tested, so if the test asks the student to check a box to indicate their race at the top of the form, and the student associated Whiteness with academic success and their own race with other attributes, they may perform less well on the test.  And while newer versions of the IQ test have been standardized on large, racially diverse samples, this certainly wasn’t the case historically, with Whiteness the norm both in the standardization process as well as in the test questions themselves. Jen Lumanlan 06:09 In a second wave of research in the 1930s-1960s, Louis Thurstone identified seven primary mental abilities that he claimed were statistically independent of each other.  These were verbal comprehension or understanding, verbal fluency or the ability to quickly generate a large number of words with specific characteristics, rapid arithmetic computation, the ability to recognize symbols quickly, inductive reasoning, spatial visualization, and memory.  For those of you who have been listening for a while and remember back to our episodes on patriarchy, that list probably sounds to you like it does to me, which is a list of skills that are highly valued in our culture, and that are primarily the purview of men.  Notice the competitive element – doing things quickly, doing more of a thing than other people, being able to use language and numbers quickly and fluently, and using logic. There’s no indication that anything related to skills seen as more typically feminine are associated with intelligence – things like intuition or ability to navigate social situations or sensitivity.  Howard Gardner extended this work with his Multiple Intelligences model, which saw these intelligences each as an independent cognitive system, not static abilities nested under general intelligence.  The intelligences he proposed are:

1. Spatial, so visualizing the world in 3 dimensions
2. Naturalist – understanding living things and reading nature
3. Musical – discerning sounds, their pitch, tone, rhythm, and timbre
4. Body-kinesthetic – coordinating your body with your mind
5. Logical-mathematical – quantifying things, making hypotheses, and proving them
6. Linguistic – finding the right words to express what you mean
7. Intra-personal – understanding yourself, what you feel, and what you want
8. Interpersonal – sensing people’s feelings and motives

We’ll come back to critiques of this model later; for right now I just want to put it in historical context. Jen Lumanlan 07:58 Two important theories came out of the Third Wave of research was Joseph Renzulli’s Three Ring Definition, which saw giftedness as the interaction of three characteristics: well-above-average ability, which he defines as the top 15-20% of any domain - much different than most models which consider the top 3-5% of individuals to be gifted, creativity, and task commitment.  Renzulli also proposed two types of giftedness – schoolhouse giftedness, which is related to test taking and lesson learning, where knowledge is consumed, and creative-productive giftedness, where knowledge is created and produced.  He reminds us that “History tells us it has been the creative and productive people of the world, the producers rather than consumers of knowledge, the reconstructionists of thought in all areas of human endeavor, who have become recognized as ‘truly gifted’ individuals. History does not remember persons who merely scored well on IQ tests.”  Critics of this approach argue that task commitment and creativity aren’t really part of giftedness, but are developed over the course of the person’s life, and that there may not be a link between the traits of children with various levels of IQ and their later life achievements.  The second important model is Sternberg’s WICS model, which sees giftedness as a synthesis of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity.  This is the first model that looks outside the individual, with wisdom being the use of knowledge and abilities to balance one’s own and others’ interests to achieve a common good, in both the long-and-short terms, through the use of ethical values.  Intelligence means following a life course that matches the person’s goals and capitalizes on strengths while compensating for or correcting for weaknesses, and creativity is the production of new, surprising, and compelling ideas or products.  Gifted people aren’t necessarily strong at all aspects, but they follow their strengths and compensate for or correct their weaknesses to adapt to, shape, and select experiences. Jen Lumanlan 09:53 A fourth wave of research yielded an absolute slew of theories which overall widened the lens even more by placing talent within a developmental context that includes external variables like the person’s family, their education, social and cultural context, and historical events and trends – along with luck sometime.  Overall we’ve moved on from the idea that giftedness only consists of general intelligence and is completely determined by our genes.  Newer theories also focus on explaining the talent development process rather than listing traits that comprise giftedness.  The main differences between newer theories include disagreements about the role of abilities not linked to intellect, the role of creativity, and whether giftedness is a potential or an achievement that we can only see after a person has built up expertise in a particular domain.  Unfortunately, most schools still use IQ scores as the primary criteria to determine whether a child gets into a gifted and talented program, and several states require a minimum intelligence test score for a gifted program to be funded.  This creates a difficult situation where researchers now see giftedness as being much broader than IQ, but schools are still stuck firmly back in the first wave of tools – primarily because they’re cheap and easy to administer. So that’s overall what the research has said over the years about what giftedness is.  Here I want to introduce the idea that giftedness is a social construct, which means that it isn’t a ‘thing’ by itself.  It only exists because we say it exists.  So when we get into endless debates about whether a person should be at the 80^th percentile or the 97^th percentile to be called gifted, it’s arbitrary.  We can put the line wherever we want.  We have a hundred models of what giftedness is because it’s a social construct – it’s not that we are trying to understand what giftedness is and we can’t quite see it clearly; it’s that we can’t DECIDE what we think it is.  We’ll get into this more in a minute, but it does seem fairly clear that for a long time, definitions of giftedness in the mainstream research, which is what I’ve described to you so far, prioritize a White-centered view of giftedness, as well as how achievement that is associated with giftedness is defined.  Researchers are looking for gold medals in mathematics competitions, Nobel prize winners, champions in whatever field the individual chooses, and whether a country can lead its peers in league tables of standardized test scores, all of which promote without question the White centric, competitive, dominant view of success. Jen Lumanlan 12:17 And when we play with the cutoff lines and talk about increasing the representation of students who don’t identify as White in gifted and talented programs, we’re then saying that some White students aren’t as gifted as we’d thought.  If one more Black person is called ‘gifted’ but threshold doesn’t change, then one White person who used to be gifted is no longer gifted.  Obviously, I’m not arguing against the identification of more people who aren’t White as gifted; I’m just calling out that the entire system of cutoffs is completely arbitrary.  Dr. James Borland, whom we’ll meet again at the end of the episode, facetiously describes “geographical giftedness,” which is the “not uncommon phenomenon whereby a gifted child, so labeled by his or her school district, finds himself or herself no longer gifted after moving to another school system.”  We can start to see that the concept of giftedness has a lot in common with the concept of race, which is to say it’s a construct that’s established by the dominant culture, using ‘scientific evidence’ as proof that it’s a thing, while we move the goalposts anytime we feel like it to best serve our needs. Normally this is the point in the episode where we lament the lack of cross-cultural research available on the topic that we’re studying, but we’re super lucky here! There’s actually a good deal of research on how people in different cultures see giftedness, and it turns out that they see it quite differently from the way mainstream White culture does.  So, let’s take a look at that how people from a number of different Indigenous tribes, as well as Mezistos (which is a term describing a person of mixed American Indian and European ancestry in Central and South America), and Black people here in the U.S. Jen Lumanlan 13:52 One group that has been particularly active in this space are researchers at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, led by Dr. Michael Christie.  Yes, it is somewhat disappointing that the head of the Contemporary Indigenous Governance and Knowledge Systems research project at Charles Darwin appears to be White, but this does not appear to be the typical extractive model of research where a White professor visits a community, publishes peer-reviewed papers about what they learned, and remembers to thank the anonymous participants who were so generous with their time.  Dr. Christie works with the Yolngu [Yolnu] Aboriginal Consultants Initiative sees Yolngu elders as experts.  The website for this project has photos of the experts and the projects they’ve consulted on, and includes transcripts of the conversations, and shows the photos of each consultant alongside what they say. I’m afraid I won’t be able to do the pronunciation of their names justice, but I’ll include a link to the page where you can see them in the references.  There are three main ideas that came up again and again in this discussion of giftedness.  Firstly, that giftedness is associated with community leadership.  A person doesn’t have gifts by themselves or for themselves.  The gift isn’t there for the child; it belongs to everyone.  This is in huge contrast to how people in WEIRD cultures see giftedness, which is that it’s entirely embedded in themselves. Leadership means knowing who you’re related to, meaning your extended extended family, so being able to name all of your relationships with their second cousins, and know the connections between you, and also knowing the land – understanding what is here, what isn’t here that’s supposed to be here, how to hunt, and how to harvest. Another aspect of being a community leader is being patient, and a good listener, especially to elders.  When asked about how elders identify gifted and talented children, one consultant told a story: in the old days when boys were to go through their initiation ceremony, they would have ancestral designs painted on their chest telling the land where they belong to, or what creatures their totem is. After being painted, the boys would have to wait several days before their ceremony, sitting quietly and solemnly, listening to the ancestral singing and watching the preparations. Some boys would wriggle and play around and their paintwork would get messed up.  After a few days, it was pretty easy to see which...