Protocols for Identification

The equitable identification of youth from all cultural, linguistic, and economic groups for gifted programming is a longstanding and tragic problem in gifted education. Many factors contribute to fallible, discriminatory identification practices, including identification based on manifest gifted behaviors alone (as opposed to gifted potential), on high cut-off scores on nationally normed instruments that yield differential results, and on exclusionary procedures where students must meet several criteria for identification or pass through a nomination gate for consideration. This chapter provides guidance for addressing access, equity, and missingness of underserved students in gifted education. Emphasis is placed on talent development, substantial changes to identification and programming, policy, and urgency to address systemic racism as steps critical to developing equitable, inclusive, socially just, and effective gifted education programming.

The Forgotten Many

Limited economic resources and geographic challenges can lead rural schools in areas experiencing poverty to deprioritize gifted education. However, for the wellbeing of individual students and their communities, investing in quality rural gifted education is crucial. In this chapter, the authors discuss some of the challenges to providing equitable gifted programming to students in rural areas and present approaches to meeting those challenges (e.g., cluster grouping, mentoring). They then describe a large-scale federally-funded research project, Promoting PLACE in Rural Schools, which demonstrated methods districts can use to bolster gifted education programming. With 14 rural districts in high-poverty areas of the southeastern United States, researchers worked with teachers and school leaders to establish universal screening processes for identifying giftedness using local norms, to teach students the value of a growth mindset in reducing stereotype threat, and to train teachers on using a place-based curriculum to provide more impactful language arts instruction to gifted rural students.

A Social Justice Approach to Developing Equity and Diversity in Gifted Programming

This chapter encourages educators to expand boundaries and build new, innovative approaches to increasing equity and diversity in gifted programming. Using a social justice approach to gifted programming, the authors describe methods for overcoming barriers that have historically, and continue, to suppress access to appropriate services for underserved populations in gifted education. This chapter provides an impetus for educators to reflect on ways to build upon and improve existing structures to adopt and adapt practices that embrace an inclusive approach to gifted identification and programming.

Excellence, equity, and talent development: Time to retire the g-word

This essay offers six reasons why the field of gifted education should retire the terms giftedness and gifted. Additionally, in the historical context of longstanding, severe, and pervasive racial and income inequities in the field of gifted education, the term Master’s Discourse is introduced and defined in this call to change terminology. Among the reasons to move on from the gifted terminology are its racist history; its association with underrepresentation; waning support for gifted programming; years of debate in the field over the use of these terms; issues with giftedness being narrowly defined by ability tests; and the need for language to evolve.