Individual, collective, and contextual aspects in the identification of giftedness

Abstract

Giftedness is typically thought of as an individual characteristic. But the development and labeling of an individual as “gifted” is always a collective process and takes place embedded within local, sociocultural, and temporal contexts. The view of giftedness as individual is deceptive and results in faulty practice, such as the bestowal of huge advantages in development and labeling upon children whose parents have more substantial financial and other resources. This article applies a pentagonal implicit theory of giftedness to the analysis of individual, collective, and contextual factors in development and labeling and concludes that giftedness should never be viewed merely as an individual characteristic. Doing so not only distorts reality but creates procedures that tend to pass identification and development of “giftedness” inequitably through successive generations of families by virtue of the families’ resources.