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Chapter 1
The Actiotope Model of Giftedness
An Introduction to some Central Theoretical Assumptions
Albert Ziegler, Wilma Vialle and
Bastian Wimmer
Scenario 1: Favela Rocinha in the south of Rio de Janeiro. Little Carlos is sitting on three piled-up tyres. The four chairs around the only table in the wooden hut are occupied by his oldest brother and his friend playing cards together.
Scenario 2: 155th street, Holocombe Rucker Playground, in the middle of a neighborhood in the poorest part of Harlem. Mike, aged eight, is dreaming of doing one āslam dunkā after another some day during the āRuckerā, the worldās most famous street basketball tournament.
Scenario 3: The room of Lian, a third-grade pupil. Sheās going to do a mathematics test in two weeks, but cannot decide if she should start studying or watch a TV show which is very popular among her classmates.
It may seem unlikely to us that Carlos is going to be a professional card player, that Mike is going to be a professional basketball player or that Lian is going to be a great mathematician. But how could this scenario change?
Effective Action Repertoires
These are three scenarios, representing three totally different worlds of actions and opportunities for personal development. Conventional models of talent propose that the key to answering this question lies in the special personality traits of the three children. These models label them with talents, gifts, abilities, and so on (Shavinina, 2009; Sternberg and Davidson, 2005). By contrast, the actiotope model of giftedness emphasizes the dynamic interaction of individuals with the environment. The focus of interest under the actiotope model, then, is action not traits. All humans have a different action repertoire ā that is, the possibilities for acting ā which they could realize in principle. Carlos, for example, can play cards in a very sophisticated way for a boy of his age. Mike scores the most points with a basketball compared to his friends and Lian masters arithmetical operations that would normally be expected of children two years older than her. Although these three youngsters show remarkable performance in special fields for their age, their action repertoire is not comparable to that of an expert in his or her special field. Experts have a far more effective action repertoire, which differs on at least seven characteristics from the repertoires of actions of Carlos, Mike or Lian (Ericsson, 1998; Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich and Hoffman, 2006). These seven characteristics comprise the following:
- The action repertoire of experts in their specialty includes actions that are more successful. A professional musician who is asked to play a new track will immediately find a much better interpretation than a good amateur musician. Similarly, chess Grand Masters, who analyze chess patterns, find much stronger turns than a novice chess player. Mathematics professors can solve complex equation systems with ease; the average person finds them very dif-ficult to understand.
- The action repertoire of experts in their specialty is far more elaborated. Chess Grand Masters, for example, have as many useful chess patterns (chunks) saved in their mind as there are words in their native language. They record more items of information, recognize the diverse relationships among them, and save those items in a more structured manner.
- Access to effective actions. Experts have sophisticated strategies, enabling them to retrieve successful actions and solutions to problems more quickly and in a more targeted manner. By contrast, the novice has access to poor choices along with possibilities for success. If you have managed to ride a bike without falling off, for example, there is no guarantee that the next time you ride a bike you will also be free of accidents.
- Analysis of problems. Before experts act, they analyze the problem extensively and create a more actionāfunctional problem representation than does a novice.
- Physical adaptations. The bodies of experts are adjusted in many ways to the requirements of their domain. To illustrate, this applies not only to the different muscular systems of weightlifters, table tennis players and radiologists, but also to the specialized regions of their brains, which are enlarged in connection to their activities.
- Strategies. Experts use more suitable strategies to arrive at a solution. Expert physicians, for example, start with the given information and work their way through to the solution of the problem. Students of physics, however, typically reverse this process and try to work their way backwards from the unknown, to the given information.
- Cognitive effort. Experts have automated an enormous number of cognitive action steps. They do not have to be laboriously constructed to solve a problem, but can simply be retrieved. Consequently, cognitive resources are available for the analysis of aspects of problems, whose solutions are unknown at this point.
Taken together, these characteristics explain why experts, with their effective action repertoires, are superior to the average capable person in their special field. However, these findings do not explain why some people are able to develop from an ordinary action repertoire to an extraordinarily effective action repertoire. Do talents and gifts actually play the critical role that conventional giftedness researchers believe?
Intelligence Adaptations
If giftedness researchers want to assess whether Carlos, Mike or Lian could ever build up an exceptionally effective action repertoire, they usually want to examine whether these three children bring talents and gifts with them. In the actiotope model, this question is regarded as less scientific. The question that is asked is whether all three can learn in an effective way; which enables them to build up an excellent action repertoire in card playing, basketball or mathematics. The answer is given within the scope of the systemic paradigm. The fundamental theoretical unit on which all analyses are based is the actiotope.
What is an Actiotope?
The focus of the actiotope approach is action and the possibilities for acting possessed by individuals. These can only be understood if we recognize them as a result of three adaptations:
- a biological adaptation that was mainly carried by the human species and is conceptually locatable in biotopes;
- a social adaptation that is mainly carried by social associations, which we can conceptually locate in sociotopes; and
- an individual adaptation that is carried by individuals, which we can conceptually locate in actiotopes.
Essentially all actions, which are of interest in research on giftedness, are a result of these three adaptations. If Carlos puts a card on the table, for example, he does it with his hand (not with a fin or a wing); this is a consequence of biological adaptation (in biotopes). Both the card game itself and its rules are the results of a social adaptation (in sociotopes). The choice of particular card moves is a result of Carlosās individual adaptation (which happens in his actiotope). In a similar vein, all of Lianās arithmetic skills are based upon enormous developments in the information processing of the vertebrates (in biotopes), the development of the mathematics discipline (in sociotopes) and the individual development of her arithmetic skills (in her actiotope).
In line with these introductory remarks, we can define an actiotope thus:
An actiotope includes an individual and the material, social and informational environment with which that individual actively interacts.
Three Perspectives on the Actiotope
Every actiotope is unique. In every actiotope, the individual can access a range of special possibilities for interacting with his or her environment. Every environment sets different conditions for success. When faced with a particular environment and the possibilities of learning which that environment affords, individuals construct their action repertoire.
Action repertoires always have functionality that is unique to the actiotope in which the individual is currently acting. Hence, actiotopes are conceptual analytical units, in which the individualās acting and the possibilities of actions within the environment are integrated. Instead of single personal traits like talents or gifts, the actiotope approach examines individuals and their individual world of actions.1 System-theoretical considerations are significant from three perspectives:
- The component perspective (What are the elements of an actiotope? How do they interact?).
- The dynamic perspective (How do actiotopes change?).
- The system perspective (How do actiotopes remain stable, especially as they develop into excellence?).
Component Perspective
All actions show four characteristics. The action in question:
- is part of the action repertoire of the person;
- pursues an aim that seems reachable because of this action;
- is made possible because the situation was constituted in a way to allow this action; and,
- is selected because the person decided that the action was the most expedient in this situation from the repertoire of possible actions.
Based on this analysis of actions, the actiotope approach distinguishes four components:
- The action repertoire is the total of individual possibilities of actions (e.g. first grade pupils typically can add and multiply in their heads, while fourth grade pupils can also calculate the same operations in a notational way. Hence, the latterās mathematical action repertoire is more comprehensive.).
- Goals, which are targeted conditions by the individual through actions (e.g. learning targets, social aims, professional goals).
- Environmentāthe material, social and informational environment with which an individual actively interacts (i.e. within the actiotope) as well as the external environments of an actiotope.
- Subjective action space, which are the possibilities of actions considered by the individual (to reach the aims, the most promising actions in this situation are chosen from the personal action repertoireāe.g. in a basketball match Mike may dribble around his opponent using the right instead of the left side; Carlos may try a bluff in his first card game for money when he has a bad set of cards; and Lian may choose an indirect mathematical proof for a mathematical theorem).
As the bracketed examples suggest, the four components are not only involved in the accomplishment of excellent performance actions, but are also constituents of every action, especially for learning actions.
While points 1 (action repertoire, or what may be viewed as competencies) and 2 (goals) have been explored within the field of gifted education, the environment and the subjective space of actions have not received adequate theoretical examination. In this chapter, only the the role of environment is discussed further.
A Proposal to Analyze Environment: Sociotopes
To study the learning efficiency of environments, Ziegler (2008, 2009) suggested the construct of sociotopes. Sociotopes are relatively stable configurations of the environment, which exert stable influences on the actions of individuals. Spoken in system theoretical jargon, sociotopes are control variables (Thelen and Smith, 2006 ).
Some conceptual preliminary remarks are important. First, sociotopes are understood as a framework condition of tangible actions. Second, they are conceived in a specific way in view of learning possibilities (e.g. an environment may be a learning sociotope for playing football, but not for mathematics). Third, the relativity of sociotopes has to be considered (i.e. the same spatial environment can be a totally different sociotope for different individuals).
A sociotope concept, which fulfils these conditions, conceives environments not as a geographical area, but as a space of action for individuals. Thereby an objective action space and a normative action space are distinguished (Ziegler, 2011). Lianās learning should serve as an example. This case is concerned with actions in mathematics, which literally means that both objective and normative actions are conceived in view of mathematical actions (e.g. learning maths, doing a calculation, watching a movie about the life of a mathematician, talking about maths, and so on).
Under objective action space, the total of possibilities of actions is understood as those that can be theoretically executed in a given situation. Classrooms, train compartments, slopes, swimming pools, and so on, can offer these totally different objective action spaces of actions.
Within the normative space of actions, every possible action from the point of view of the individual may either be desirable, undesirable or without any normative valence.2 That implies the classification illustrated in Table 1.1 (cf. Ziegler, 2008; 2009).
Table 1.1 Classification of sociotopes in the domain of mathematics
Learning Sociotope
Here, learning is possible and desired. Learning sociotopes can be a classroom during lessons, or completing homework at a desk at home. Additionally, they can include situations for learning outside the school context, such as extra-curricular music lessons, language courses, or sports training. These represent all the environments in which Lianās mathematical learning is desired. There is a good case to believe that she is in more of these mathematical learning sociotopes than Carlos or Mike. Those individuals would be more frequently in the learning sociotopes in which they could improve in card playing or basketball respectively.
Infrastructural Sociotopes
These also allow performance gain and learning, but the accomplishment of learning actions is voluntary. Learning mathematics, for example, is something that Lian can also do on a park bench, during a bus or train ride, with an opened booklet at the breakfast table or by using mathematical knowledge offerings featured in the media. In Mikeās case every backyard with a basketball hoop can be an infrastructural sociotope. A group of card-playing friends, who are not playing to improve, can be an infrastructural sociotope for Carlos.
Avoidance Sociotype
In an avoidance sociotope, learning is possible, but not desired. It is possible that Lian wants to use a recess break, spare time at school, or a day off from school to learn mathematics, but she encounters criticism from her classmates and/or her parents. She is then placed in the awkward situation of having to justify her wish to learn. Equally, Mike and his friends could be told...
