The chapter for Barry 25th April 07 another
draft
Living educational theory research:
creating inclusive and inclusional understandings of gifts and talents.
"Giftedness as a
function of individual enquiry and LTAR - a reciprocal transaction?"
I have increasingly become involved as an
educational psychologist in ‘gifted and talented education’ over more than a
decade. I no longer work for a school psychology service but when I am asked,
‘what do you do?’ I am struck speechless. I can tell you at length the
activities that make up my day, the meetings I have with who, the workshops
that I either directly or indirectly run for children, young people and adults,
the calendar of my working life, but that doesn’t seem to really answer the
question. Can I give you the same problem by asking you ‘what do you do?’ You
are not allowed to respond with your job title, for instance, if you work as a
teacher you can not just answer ‘I teach’; so what do you say? How close does
what you say actually communicate what you think you are doing; what gets you
to work early and has you leaving late?
I could explain I am implementing my
employer’s vision statement, for instance (by the way this was written with
young people not for them):
“We want all Children and Young People
to do better in life than they ever thought they could. We will give children
and young people the help that they need to do this”
This at least carries some indication of
the values that drive me. I could add that the focus of my work is to enable
children and young people to grow as thoughtful, thought full learners, with
informed aspirations and the confidence and competence to pursue them to the
benefit of themselves and others, and for them to be able to contribute to, and
benefit from, their own learning and that of others. This perhaps communicates
a little more about what I value and hints at the educational theories that
attract me and I seek to embody in my practice.
Now, when I tell you that I run workshops
for children, young people and adults, I encourage educators to work on their
master’s programme to construct and make public accounts of their own living
theory, I talk with people… do you have a bit more of an insight into what I
do? I believe you might but, and it is a very big BUT, I think the list of
activities still does not come alive, does not communicate what I without that
sense of communication there is no shared space for a conversation which will
be useful to either of us.
For me to make what I do live in your
imagination I need to communicate much more about how I judge what I do in a
way that I hope you feel is useful and meaningful to you in your quest to
improve the educational experiences you are contributing to.
I do not believe the efficacy of gifted and
talented educational theory and practice can be determined by ‘value added’
indicators such as how many children’s scores are 2 standard deviations above
the average, how many young people gain A* 3 years before others, how many of
this group go to a prestigious university, whether that programme produces more
Nobel or Booker prize winners. Inevitably some of the standards by which
judgements are made are given; for instance the government impose targets arising
from their national strategies and agendas. I am required to comply but in
doing so I need to understand better how I can work with them so they
contribute to, rather than compromise, what I believe to be excellent gifted
and talented educational theory and practice. The ‘given’ standards are only a
very small part of the story. Educational practice is values laden so I believe
it is very important for me to continually return to why I am doing the work
that I am doing to see whether I am still being true to myself; to clarify and
test myself against the evolving standards of judgements which drive my
practice and arise from within my own living educational values and theories.
…as we conduct our research and generate
our own living educational theories. These theories are living in the sense
that they are our theories of practice, generated from within our living
practices, our present best thinking that incorporates yesterday into today,
and which holds tomorrow already within itself’ Whitehead
and McNiff 2006, p3.
What has this to do with ‘giftedness’?
First and foremost I have a commitment to improving the educational experience
of all children and young people with the intention of contributing to the
opportunity for us all generatively learn to live satisfying and productive
lives in a humane world. I don’t believe I can, or should, try to tell someone
how to live their life. I do want to contribute to the possibility of them
acquiring and creating insights, understandings, skills, attitudes and
knowledge which will help them. I do not believe it is possible to predict what
contributions a person will make to the learning of us all through their lives
but I do believe that they can be influenced for better or worse. I am seeking
ways of improving the contribution I make through the ‘lens’ of ‘gifted and
talented education’ by developing inclusive and inclusional living educational
theory and practice focussing on gifts and talents as dynamic, living
educational concepts. I am seeking to learn from rather than replicating the
mistakes that I believe come from working within fixed logics and
epistemologies. I gave an example of what I mean in a paper presented at the
BERA 2006 conference (Huxtable, 2006)
The issues faced through my career with ‘special needs’ are now being revisited with the governments interest in ‘the other end’ and can be seen in the language and procedures offered by the DFES in various strategies; ‘gifted and talented children’, identification, registers, special programmes of study…Transpose the pre 70’s education language to that of the current day – abnormal to exceptional, subnormal to extraordinary, disability to high ability and you find the same concept of measurement through an ordinal ratio scale and misinterpreting correlations as causal relationships, with the intention of quantifying education and categorising children.(Huxtable, 2006)
I did not realise how culturally determined
a great deal of the education policy I am familiar with is until I read Joan
Freeman’s observations on cultural differences:
The major cultural dichotomy affecting
educational provision for the gifted and talented is between the largely
Eastern perception - ‘all children have gifted potential’ - and the largely
Western one - ‘only some children have gifted potential’. (Freeman,2002 p9)
She clearly demonstrates that ‘gifted and
talented’ is a north European construct and it is not a universal truth. I
believe this is very important as we live in a time when the need for us all to
appreciate and learn from diverse cultures is increasingly recognised. I am
also encouraged by her reflection that:
'The human spirit survives most attempts
to be categorised, selected and treated in accord - for good or ill.' p188
Through working with living logics and
epistemologies I believe I can contribute to evolving, rather than revolving,
educational theory and practice. Whitehead (2007)
distinguishes living logics, from the propositional and dialectical logics used
in the majority of research accounts, as a logic that emerges in the course of
the evolution of one’s own form of life, with responses to the possibilities
that life itself permits. He advocates the use of a living logic in the
generation of explanations of educational influence in one’s own learning, in
the learning of others and in the learning of social formations.
As I have said I don’t feel I can really
communicate what I do unless I can explain why I do what I do yet ‘why’ is one
of the most difficult questions in the world to ask let alone create answers
to. I began to get a little closer to it in 2005 when I was beginning to become
acquainted with living educational theory research (Whitehead
and McNiff, 2006):
Why do I do what I do? I want children
to grow as people who are comfortable in their own skin, knowing themselves,
liking themselves, at peace with themselves, knowing what they want to work on,
to improve, and to have the courage to change and accept their own stumbling
and that of other people as part of the journey.
I believe that an individual learns what
they see themselves capable of learning and what is of value to them. The
striving for excellence seems to carry with it a hope of personal fulfilment
and when that personal ambition coincides with the needs of others, carries
with it a hope for the progression of all of us and ‘twice affirmation’ for the
individual. (part of an
email from me to Jack Whitehead Oct 2005)
What these words don’t communicate is the
inner pleasure, the feelings of camaraderie, laughter, love, the joy of being
alive, the delight in recognition, affirmation and creativity... the very
essence of educational values that I do not want to loose sight of. I am not
suggesting that life is, or even could or should be, a bed of roses. Or maybe I
am and I need to remember that the wood of the stems which are uncomfortable
and the thorns that can cause real pain are as much a part of the bed as the
velvet soft petals, the sweet scent, the stamens, the closed buds with hidden
centres and the wriggly things that are always there when you get up close and
personal. I choose to focus on the pleasure as I tend to get what I look for
and while I appreciate the necessity of struggle, frustration, angst, toil…
they serve a purpose which is communicated in these photographs; the pleasure
of living a satisfying and productive life in a humane world.
(Thanks to Ed Harker,
Moira Laidlaw, Joy Mounter
and Belle Wallace for their photos)
I ask you to look at the images of these
children and experience the pleasure that I feel. Look beyond the delightful
images to appreciate they could not have happened without the sensitivity and
talent of the educators to create and appreciate a context where pleasure could
be expressed, where a gift could be created, valued and offered, where children
could physically, emotionally, socially, cognitively boldly go.
These may be brief moments caught and
transfixed through these images so we can share in them but I need to remember
they are continuing to live in the children pictured, those around them and the
educator who is the other side of the camera. Ed Harker
wrote in his master’s educational enquiry account where he had brought the
photo to his colleagues
One
suggested that the photograph needed a lot of explanation as to the particular
circumstances of the valley walk before the photo could be seen as
"validated evidence" for anything! Without such contextual
information it merely stood as a 'nice picture'....
Lisa then pointed out the fact that as
the photograph was clearly taken by somebody ahead of Daniel, it does not show
him "leading the way" as I had originally suggested. I had taken the
photograph, and we then realised that Daniel's expression was actually a
reaction to my photographing of him. He is reacting directly to the attention
that I am giving him with the camera. As a result of this discussion I now
believe that this picture stands as evidence of my educational influence on
Daniel through the trusting and enjoyable relationship that emerged during his
year in my nursery class, the kind of relationship that underpins deep
learning. Through the year that Daniel was in the nursery the educational
values that I enact in my daily practise enabled him to learn the skills and
dispositions that he needed to learn at that time.
(Harker, 2006)
Can I ask you to think how it might
transform practice if we sought evidence like Ed Harker’s
to enable us to research and communicate the quality of the educational
experience we want to hold ourselves accountable to? How might it transform
lives if we worked with children and young people to generate and share
evidence of the gifts they were creating, offering and valuing and the talents
they were developing rather than to simply keep an account of whether they
gained 99 marks instead of 98 on an exam paper?
Joy Mounter
expressed this well in her masters educational enquiry
when she wrote:
…but shouldn't equally the children have
a voice?
Shouldn't there be an expectation that
to have a clear picture all need to understand the process of reflection
through action research and have a platform to share ideas and be listened to!
'Every human being has the potential to
manifest the finest mosaic of attributes in a dazzling complexity of difference
and diversity. Yet so often, this human mosaic is dull and tarnished – only a
hint of the incipient splendour remains. And yet, sometimes, we are inspired by
the light radiated from an individual.'
(Author unknown)
For me the Tuesday group's interests and
passions that come through in discussions have been the 'inspirational light'
that has recharged my thirst for self knowledge and clarity of values.
Sometimes it does feel like a fight. A fight against indifference and
complacency with the order of things or stepping into the unknown and taking a
risk! Sometimes following an idea and finding it leads to new ideas that you
hadn't even thought of. But it is so easy in a busy life to be blinkered and to
push forwards and not to stop and think about the learning journey. (Mounter, 2006)
Although the differences in the language
used, such as ‘gifts and talents’ and ‘gifted and talented’ might appear
trivial the consequences are not. How can you recognise the gift of
‘inspirational light’, pleasure, ‘an attentive ear’, a creative space…when you
seek to ‘define and categorise’ people or even singular skills or events?
By the time I got around to Robert’s
desk, he’d managed an illegible sentence, in his typically tight, misspelled
and dysfluent script.
I asked him what he’d written and there was a long pause as he tried to
make sense of his work. Then he replied,
in a voice so slow and soft I hardly heard him: “Even the winter leaves have
their own secret colours”.
That was it. One line. But what a line! It was mid-summer, and Robert had found and
studied a solitary, decaying winter-leaf.
And in his observations and his slow reflections, Robert captured an
image that contained a most deliberate metaphor. He was saying, I’m convinced, “Mr Hymer, notice me. I
know I’ve not got a great deal going for me in school, but just sometimes, in
some situations, I can do things that will amaze you”. (Hymer, 2007)
How would you understand Robert’s or Barry Hymer’s gifts? I understand them as dynamic, living and
relational from the glimpse of their creation, valuing and offering; the gift
of recognition and appreciation of the other, the gift of their poetic
communication, the gift of time, space and focussed attention, Each gift
discernable but not separable and each gift crafted over time, in the moment of
the offering, and in the valuing through use in the tomorrow.
What do I understand by gifts? The
possibility of living a satisfying and productive life seems to me to be
influenced by a person finding a point of passion for what they can bring into
the world that is of worth. The person is their own judge of the value of what
they create but there is also a pleasure that comes with bearing the other in
mind. The worth is connected with the investment of something very personal;
time, energy, resources, consideration, love, effort, a willingness to
endure...
This is something I see in this picture
taken by Belle Wallace. This child’s gift is not an abstraction; it is the
crafting of the artefact, her intention, the connection between herself and
Belle that you can see in her eyes, her smile, the way she is, and in the
pleasure flowing between the child and Belle at that moment when the gift is
valued by them both; the gift is in the moment, co-created in the receptive,
responsive (thank you Alan Rayner) flow within and
between them.
This
pleasure in the flow of connection in the mutual valuing of the gifts created
is something I feel in this picture taken by Joy Mounter.
It is not just in the obvious connection being expressed in the foreground but
within the educational context that Joy has created, and is part of in taking
this photograph. She wrote
This picture for me holds so much
emotion and joy. It describes the journey to emotional learning and celebration
in my classroom. The moment when two children shared their
joy of learning and success at solving a problem with each other spontaneously.
(Mounter, 2006)
I am making a distinction between
‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusional’ educational theory and practice. Unfortunately
‘inclusional’ can also be used to mean inclusive. I have illustrated what I
mean by my use of the word ‘inclusive’; how can I
contribute to an educational context where everyone can value and evolve better
understanding of the gifts they create and develop their talents to create, offer
and share their gifts. When I use the word ‘inclusional’ I am working with an
idea by Alan Rayner. Inclusional educational theories
and practice are not well known as yet in the education world but Whitehead’s work on living theory and action research is.
So I will borrow his words and in doing so I hope it will give you a context of
that might be a little more familiar to you in which to think about something
new.
Inclusionality is a dynamic awareness of space and boundaries that is connective,
reflective and co-creative. Jack Whitehead’s summary
based on Rayner (2005)
I find it is easier to understand when I
watch Alan Rayner explaining what he understands by inclusionality in a video clip that has become known as the
paper dance which can be seen on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVa7FUIA3W8
Alan Rayner’s
work on inclusionality and Jack Whitehead’s
work on living values and living educational theories has offered me language,
theories and methodologies to theorise and research my practice in a way that
enables me to improve my practice and where what I do stays connected to what I
intend to do. It is the space and music in which there can be a dance between
theory and practice and new knowledge can be created that holds the values and
aspirations. (Huxtable,
2006)
I hope looking beyond the photographs helps
you to understand a little more of what I mean by the space and music in which
a person reflects on their embodied understandings and continues to create
their own theories of the life they want to live.
Dweck’s (2000) work gives a very plausible theoretical explanation for the veracity of the well known saying
If you think you can or you think you
cant you are probably right - Henry Ford
or in the words of one of Joy Mounter’s
pupils
‘I have learnt to never underestimate my
skills of craft and learning, because nothing is impossible to a child with
imagination.’ (Learning evaluation by R. aged 10)
While I have not budged from a life times
assertion that most people can accomplish most things I do recognise that the
realisation of an ambition requires more than just a dream; just saying, ‘this
is how I want things to be’ does not make them so. ‘What is needed to move from
dreaming to the possibility of a living reality?’ This seems to be an
underlying question that people have occasionally asked for themselves and
frequently for others as parent, friend, educator, politician, although the
reasons and purposes that are behind the question are not necessarily clear,
shared or compatible.
Some people only seem to ask that question
of themselves, ‘what is my ambition and how do I realise it’, when they are a
child and some accept the answer given by an influential adult such as teacher
or parent, others continue to ask and create answers for themselves throughout
their lives; sometimes with profound and life changing consequences for
themselves and others. I believe the question is one that has many possible
answers; the ‘right ones’ are those that carry hope for a person to live a
satisfying and productive life contributing to a humane society. I believe that
I neither have the right nor the ability to answer the question for another,
but as an educator I am continually asking, ‘How do I contribute to the
possibility of a person creating ‘right answers’ for themselves’?
I believe that others have similar
inclusive and inclusional educational values and glimpses can be heard on
occasions even in government strategies such as this one:
“Personalised learning is not something that can be ‘done’ by teachers to pupils. Rather it arises when pupils themselves take charge of their own goals and progress, together with a heightened awareness of their own learning styles and preferences. When young people enjoy a range of opportunities to test themselves, to explore their talents and cultivate new interests, they come to a deeper appreciation of how learning works, what can inhibit it and in what ways it can nourish self belief. When there are rich extended sites for learning, young people grasp that the purpose of school is not to provide an education but to stimulate a thirst for learning, and to give it life beyond the school gate.” (MacBeath, 2006 p.12)
In a paper I presented at the BERA annual
conference (2006) I explained:
My challenge is how to enable a
youngster to build an understanding of what they want to commit time and effort
to that will enable them to live satisfying and productive lives without
imposing my own values and needs. This moves me from an impositional
pedagogy to an inclusional one where there is a co-creative space between
people; where there is a mutuality as each contributes and benefits from their
own and the others learning, skills, understandings, values.
I think Moria Laidlaw expresses something similar in an email to me where
she referred to a mutual friend,
Maturity, I believe, is taking
responsibility for one's self in the world.
He does that all the time. He doesn't project. He doesn't take on stuff
he can't follow through. He speaks the truth, whether it's easy or not. He
commits to things he's chosen to commit to. He reasons rather than emotes. And
so on. He knows what he is and what he's doing and he takes account of the
effects he has in the world and on others as well as on himself.
I would feel I had contributed something
really useful to a world of educational quality, or put another way inclusive
and inclusion theory and practice of gifted and talented education, if there
was an explicit appreciation that one of the most important gifts an educator
can create value and offer their students is an educational space to mature. It
is not a passive space. Wine maturing is not a case of a bit of liquid hanging
about doing nothing in vast vats in dark cellars for decades. There are very
active transformational processes at work in the fermentation, which when they
continue in the confines of the bottle the flow of energy in that dynamic
process can experienced all too vividly when it explodes!
‘Between stimulus and response there is
a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to
choose our response. In those choices lies our growth
and our happiness.’ (Covey 2004
p. 43).
This describes something of what I mean by
an educational space; the overt recognition of an individual’s power and
freedom, expressed as their responsibility as well as their right, to live the
life that is important to them as they contribute to a humane world. Covey
acknowledges that sometimes that ‘space’ can be very small but it still exists
and we can change the size and nature of the space for ourselves and for others,
even if only a little. So perhaps one of the explanations for why I do what I
do is because I want to enable people to expand and contribute to the creation
of their space and to make the best choices they can for themselves and a
humane world worth living in. This sense of self determination and recognition
of that space for choice is very important to me, but not as a simple
expression of a selfish, egotistical self and people as defined by fixed
boundaries.
Covey also talks of ‘happiness’ and I have
increasingly been aware, particularly over the last year or so, of the
importance of making the affective explicit as well as the cognitive in
understanding what drives me educationally.
When Samantha Etheridge talked about her
values at one of the masters group sessions what she said resonated deeply.
(video of Sam
talking with the transcript)
I just love being happy I think. My Dad
had his own little business and we hardly saw him as kids. When we got a bit
older he quit that and just took a little low paid job. He said to us never
work for money if you have the choice. Never work for money because
you spend the majority of your life at work and if you don’t enjoy it and you
are only there to earn the cash the life that you have out of your work you’ll
never be able to spend the cash you earn so you will never be happy.
If you ever have the choice work for the
love of it and so I took his advice and went to work for the health service. I
loved it. It was great after I graduated. I’ve always taken that road - I want to be happy and I think everyone should have
the right to be happy in what they do and it shouldn’t be something you are
ashamed of, loving what you.
When I worked in the Psyche Unit we had
to have psychotherapy. We were obliged to be offered it but not to take it but
we had this great guy called Nevill and we always
used to say that the nursing staff had a go at us because we always laugh when
we are working and they say that it is detrimental because it shows we
are larking about and not concentrating.
But he said that it shows great
confidence in who you are and what you do if you can
laugh as you are working and maybe it was your own insecurity if you couldn’t
laugh at work. So I’ve always thought it was OK to laugh at work at any given
point.
So loving what I do being happy and
excited being allowed to be creative being encouraged to be creative all those
things that’s why I get up and come to work.
I feel Sam’s dad and Sam are saying
something very important for me. One of the indicators which would enable me to
know if my work was successful is if I could believe I had contributed to an
educational context in which children grew to be adults able to work with love
for what they were doing, able to enjoy, to have a sense of pleasure and well
being, doing something they valued and had the possibility of being valued by
others as they lived and earned a living. Can you see evidence of children
loving what they do in the photographs in this chapter?
The other quotation that has lived with me
for a long time now is from ‘Uncommon Genius’
Everyone has an aptitude for something.
The trick is to recognise it, to honour it, to work with it. (Shekerjian,1991 p. 1)
This communicates to me a sense of self
knowledge and affirmation; an active and creative self appreciation of the
unique qualities of self and what a person can create that is valued and
valuable if they are prepared to commit time and energy. I would go further to
say making the best of an aptitude will take you only so far; the extra
ingredient is passion. I believe that when a person recognizes how to express
their passion for knowledge creation there is the possibility that they will
‘soar’ and create gifts that carry the possibility for contributing leaps
forward for us all. Treffinger et al put it as (I
would use the word gifts rather than talent because of my English context and
the terminology used by the DfES)
Talent emerges from aptitudes and/or
from sustained involvement in
areas of strong interest or passion.(Treffinger, 2007)
I would contend
though that aptitude will go nowhere without energy, whatever the source of
that passionate energy: interest, dedication to an ideal, family, love… In that
I agree with Whitehead (2007)and
Vasilyuk (1991)
Do these examples communicate what I
understand to be a world of educational quality; one which provides an
energized space for maturation, one which opens minds to possibilities of
growing as the person you choose to be, where we all have the opportunity to
explore and experiment with different ways of being, to ‘recognise, honor and work with’ our unique constellation of aptitudes
and passions and enjoy the pleasure of devoting time and energy to creating,
offering and valuing gifts of the highest quality and have the opportunity of
being in mutually pleasurable relationships; developing courage, expanding
space for choice and making ‘wise’ choices. In my work I am particularly focused
on children and young people but I recognize it is not possible to contribute
to a world of educational quality in which they can grow affectively,
cognitively and physically unless the adults also value themselves and are
continuing to grow.
This is what I understand I am trying to do
when I talk about contributing to the evolution of practice and theory of
inclusive and inclusional gifted and talented education.
Most commonly in this society people are
expected to have answered the question about what they want to do with their
lives during their childhood. I think this is illustrated by the common
questions posed to children, such as ‘what do you want to do when you grow
up?’, ‘what are you going to do when you leave school?’ However relatively little time is given in
school to working with children to equip them to ask and create answers to the
question themselves with increasing sophistication, wisdom and success. I may
be wrong but I ask you to think about the questions I am asking that leads me to
make such a sweeping claim. How much time and effort of a teacher is dedicated
to delivering the curriculum, improving the pace and challenge of the
instruction and striving to increase their pupils’ attainments? How much time
and effort of an educator is devoted to listening to their pupils, helping them
formulate their own questions that are interesting to them, helping their
pupils reflect on what really matters to them, their values and self theories,
helping them recognise their aptitudes, create gifts, articulating the
judgements they are making...?
Practice in education comes from methods
rooted in fixed logics and epistemologies where a hypothesis is offered in
terms of an answer and the test is whether the answer is ‘proved’ at the end of
the period to be right or not right. From that answer gross generalisations are
made as to how and what populations should learn, how
they should learn and how they should be taught. There is no room for creative
responses or profound learning (West Burnham(), theorising is
incidental and communicating and valuing new knowledge created by an individual
or a group has no time allotted. Pace,
challenge and stretch targets are part of the accepted language, correlations
are taken as causal relationships and ‘normal’ is a statistically driven label
disconnected from the individuals reality or needs.
There is no place for educators or children to engage in living theory action
research within a warm, nurturing, creative space for querying the ‘rightness’
of the question, to evolve their own diverse answers within which they can
experiment, create, value and offer various gifts and come to know the person
they want to be and create the future they want to live.
I have understood Living Theory Research to
be a process where I continually explore my questions and the various answers
that are interrelated with the questions. Questions and answers do not stand
apart but are in a dynamic, organic, receptive responsive relationships and it
is the individual’s values, theories and practice as well as their activities
that are researched. It is that which I think holds hope as the process of
living theory action research involves planning, evaluating and documenting in
a manner which generates understandings as people ‘recognise, honor and work with’ the knowledge and explanations that
they create and offer, to improve their own learning, that of others and
influence social formations. There is an elegant recursion which can be seen in
the work of the children, young people, educators and others working for
instance with the TASC knot which facilitates flowing, complex
inter-connections.
You can experience children creating their own theory to account for their learning as they discuss the TASC wheel with their teacher on YouTube . I believe you can only understand the gifts and talents of the children and educator within the space. How can I describe one as more gifted than another when the gift is of the living and evolving understanding that they create, value and offer each in themselves and between them? I was delighted when I watched this video. Not only could I see such sophistication in their understanding, expression and co-creation, they explained a multi dimensional model with the energy and connection of one enquiry with another moving from one dimension to another through the centre of the knot. I have been struggling similarly to express TASC not as a wheel but as a multidimensional knot which connected the learning through their enquiry with the learning about self which, for me is the power of the melding of the work of Wallace and Whitehead.
It is now recognised in the new curriculum
framework that ‘learning’ needs to be contextualised so have caught up with
those who have tried over the years to emphasis the importance of taking time
before introducing content. Gagne () emphasisis it in his learning
model, Wray ()
provided the prompt to educators through his writing frames and Wallace () introduces ‘gather and
organise’ using various skills and techniques. There is at least lip service
paid to identifying the question, generating ideas and selecting a way forward,
just held briefly before the inevitable rush to action. Most of the time is
spent in ‘doing’, learning as Bloom () describes in his first few levels, a quick nod at evaluation
and on to the next thing. A plenary rarely takes more than a few minutes and
the children will possibly make a quick note in their learning logs. This is
still driven by the standards agenda. Where is the time and effort devoted to
deep learning, time for the tortoise mind (Claxton, )?, time to
stop and stare?
Is there a moment when dream turns to
aspiration and a commitment is made to the pursuit and creation of the skills
and understandings that are required for there to be the possibility of
fulfilling the wish? Maybe there is the ‘road to
What evidence do I have that researching
inclusive and inclusional understandings and practice of gifts and talents is
an advance on the traditional approaches rooted in fixed methodologies which
demand definitions, categories, predictions… and do not contribute to an
individual creating their own unique life as they live it and the standards by
which they judge their life well lived? I ask you to look back over this
chapter and as you do so can you see evidence of children and educators who
have created, valued and offered gifts? Those gifts are valued by the creator,
through making those accounts public they have influenced me and others. I have
found their gifts valuable as they contribute to my thinking, my practice and
my life. Whether or not any of the people in this story now or some time in the
future become noticeable on national or world stages is not the final
vindication for what I am advocating. It is whether they are living satisfying
productive lives, contributing the gifts the create,
value and offer to the evolution of a world worth living in. If anything in
this chapter has given you pause for thought, a feeling of pleasure in being
connected with those whose stories are glimpsed here, if something that you
have read or seen influences the way you are in your educational context… then
I will feel I have got a little closer to understanding and communicating what
I mean when I say I am trying to research inclusive and inclusional living
educational theories and practices in the field of gifted and talented
education.
References
Harker, E. (2006) How can I carry out Masters
level educational research without abandoning my own educational values? Masters
Educational Enquiry: University of
Mounter, J. (2006) How can I live my personal
theory of education in the classroom to promote self reflection as a learner?
Masters Educational Enquiry: University of
Hymer, B. (2007) How do I understand and
communicate my values and beliefs in my work as an educator in the field of
giftedness? Doctoral Thesis submission: University of
Whitehead, J. and McNiff, J. (2006) Action Research Living Theory;
Shekerjian, D. (1991) Uncommon Genius
Treffinger, et al (2007) Fundamental Tenets