Diversity in Gifted Education

International Perspectives on Global Issues

Gillian Eriksson, Belle Wallace, Gillian Eriksson, Belle Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134235162
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely book brings together experts from around the world to share expertise and best practice to form an eclectic collection of the best approaches for teaching gifted and talented children from different cultures. Each chapter:

• presents an overview of international perspectives on the issues of multi-cultural and gifted education
• examines the critical issues related to cultural definitions of giftedness in programming for diverse gifted students
• presents regional case studies in order to inform practitioners' best practice
• examines issues of access for gifted students in relation to culture, poverty, race and gender.

In addition, details of websites and associations which offer support and advice are also provided, making this book an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, teachers and parents of gifted and talented children.

1 Cognition and underachievement

1.1 The triaxial bond of emotion, language and cognition: TASC – Thinking Actively in a Social Context

Belle Wallace

We are sentient, dynamic beings capable of change: but we can be trapped not only in the learned sense of what we are not, but also in a powerful negative mirror image of ourselves that we perceive emanating from others. Yet, we can be released through enabling interactions with those special mentors who offer constant and strong scaffolding that we are, indeed, of great worth and significance as individuals with potential.

Personal empowerment through self-esteem fuelled by praise

The greatest challenge that teachers can face is maintaining learners’ motivation to want to learn, particularly when learners’ life experiences are different from the mainstream school culture and customs. It is important then, that teachers understand the internal processes that underpin motivation. Maslow’s (1968) discussion of universal needs is still essentially relevant today: the individual needs to belong to a group, needs to feel self-esteem and self-worth, needs to experience fulfilment of personal potential through self-expression, ownership of learning and creative endeavour. Lack of motivation arises when learners feel insignificant and undervalued, and experience frequent failure. Usually learners attribute this to internal factors, such as their lack of ability over which they have no control. Children who are in a minority culture often perceive school knowledge, defined by the dominant culture, as a series of topics quite unrelated to their fragile world concept. Many feel it is useless to apply effort when faced with a difficult task, and sink into chronic underachievement and low self-esteem: they succumb to the syndrome of learned helplessness (Weiner 1985). However, when the school fully accepts learners’ cultures, not only celebrating but also integrating the cultures into the whole curriculum, pupils develop self-esteem, have a sense of belonging and experience a sense of personal significance.

As well as having a deep sense of personal significance, self-regulation and a sense of self-efficacy form the essential scaffolding for the development of high self-esteem, leading in turn to motivated learners with the belief that they are capable of learning. Central to the discussion of attribution theory, the empowerment of learners derives from learning to control their own learning: leading to the development of independent, autonomous learners (Pintrich and Schunk 1996; Weinstein and Van Mater Stone 1994). Self-regulation is the ability of learners to evaluate their own learning: to reflect on what and how they are learning, to monitor the processes of learning and to identify when there is a breakdown of understanding. Learners can then modify their approach to tasks to ensure effective learning; and this leads to the belief in self-efficacy, self-empowerment and the feeling of ownership of the learning process. Consequently, key elements that influence the development of self-efficacy lie within the processes teachers use to conduct lessons: the processes ranging along a continuum from enabling, interactive, inclusive, discursive processes to disabling, didactic, fixed content delivery. (The enabling processes are discussed more fully below.) Moreover, the feedback given by the teacher to each individual learner needs to convey a belief in the ability of the learner to succeed – positive feed-forward for success. Through verbal and non-verbal behaviours, teachers very powerfully convey their attitudes towards and expectations of the learners in the classroom: gradually the learners move closer to the teachers’ expectations – the self-fulfilling prophecy deriving from learners’ internalized reflections of themselves mirrored by people in ‘authority’ over them (Ames 1992; Dweck and Legett 1988).

Personal empowerment through communication fuelled by language

However, important though positive self-concept is for learner motivation and empowerment, the processes of learning interactions depend on how learners receive, understand and communicate through language – both verbal and nonverbal. Although there is growing acceptance of pupils’ differentiated personal profiles of strengths across the full range of human abilities (Wallace et al. 2004), essentially language is the dominant mode of communication between people. Not only is language central to informal and formal learning, but also it is essential to the processes of thinking. We rationalize and make sense of the world through language which establishes our cognitive map of processes and meanings. But our language and cognitive development are inextricably bound up with our emotional development: the earliest exchanges of language reinforce our sense of self, our feelings of worth, our emerging identities. It is to be hoped that our first experiences of the world are of loving, reinforcing, secure exchanges of soothing reassuring words, sounds and expressed feelings.

Our ‘first’ language is non-verbal and we never lose the intuitive awareness of understanding expressions and body language – that sense of feeling in communication with others. But we need verbal language to give symbolic structure to thought, and it is in developing appropriate structures and expressions, that we become truly human (Schlesinger 1993). Although debate continues as to whether thought precedes language or language precedes thought, it is obvious that the two processes are closely intertwined. Lev Vygotsky (1978) argues that the quality and quantity of children’s language development depends heavily on interaction with adults and more capable peers. When language is developed through interactive dialogue in the active process of Problemsolving, then the more capable learner leads the less capable learner through the stages of the uncertainty of not knowing and not understanding, to the full realization of knowing and crystallization of meaning and understanding. The adult learner reaches out to identify the level of understanding of the child, and constructs and builds understanding within the child’s ‘zone of proximal development’. We can see immediately what this means for the teachinglearning interaction: through active Problemsolving, mediated by appropriate language, the child understands and gains mastery and is ready for further learning.

There are many children who enter school with underdeveloped home language (L1), even from homes in the so-called developed world, where parents are so busy earning a living in order to survive, or are working long hours to buy material luxuries: these children have had insufficient time with their parents for quality, mediated interaction, and negotiation of language and understanding through Problemsolving play activities (Wallace, in progress). Such children enter school lacking the extensive building blocks of language that they need to begin more formal learning, and teachers in nurseries and playgroups are finding that they need to develop the essential language for early school learning through verbally interactive and experiential play. In many so-called developing world communities, parents necessarily work away from home finding jobs in the cities, and children are often left to fend for themselves, consumed by the need to emotionally and physically survive, and often with the additional domestic chores of carrying water and cooking over a wood fire (Wallace and Adams 1993a). In both the developed and developing world contexts the learners are under developed with regard to having the verbal tools in L1 to express their thinking and feeling, especially in the context of school.

When the school language for learning (L2) is different from the home language (L1), children are faced with the huge challenge of negotiating meaning and understanding. However, learners with well-developed home language, with appropriate mediation, can more easily build bridges and acquire the school language of learning because they have a rich internalized language structure, and can draw parallels and make the cognitive links between the two languages. Even so, the children’s home language needs to be accepted and celebrated since it is closely linked with their emotional development, sense of personal identity and sense of self-efficacy. The acceptance and practice of additive bilingual language acquisition as the means of learning and making meaning, celebrates both home and school language. Learners can switch between the second language (L2) used in school and their home language (L1), negotiating the meaning from one to the other (Wallace et al. 1996 ongoing). Additive bilingual learning, however, is still dependent on the learning being related to the social context of the learners: their culture, home background, sense of values, etc. The heavy cognitive load of negotiating meaning by straddling two languages is lessened when learners can identify with the content and find relevance within their own lives (Wallace et al. 1997, 1998, 1999). Moreover, the processes of teaching and learning using an additive bilingual approach are necessarily interactive with learners having the time and opportunity to think, negotiate meaning and communicate. In addition, the rules and grammatical structures are initially of secondary importance to the understanding of meaning: when the teacher makes the input comprehensible, the rules of the second language (L2) become internalized naturally by the learner and are used automatically (Omaggio 1986). We can find a parallel to this process when we analyse how children acquire first language expressions, structures and syntax in a richly verbal home that accepts, celebrates and mediates the child’s tentative language efforts, while supporting and extending the base of the child’s own emerging language.

However, with children who have underdeveloped home language (L1), the problems of acquiring the school language of learning are exacerbated. The school language can be a second language in two senses: different, more formal modes of the same language (extended L1) or a different language (L2). In both cases, children have not learned a rich range of expressions and structures within their home language (L1), and when faced with learning in the extended L1 of school language, or the L2 of school language, they do not have the parallel or compensatory structures to build bridges linking home language and school language. The same principles of mediation and extension of language through negotiation of meaning, apply to the development of both extended L1 language and L2 language. Teachers need to begin language mediation from the base of the learners’ own language: the language of the street, the peer group, and the home language, extending this to incorporate ‘new’ language for more formal learning. The teacher input has to be comprehensible to learners: Dromi (1993) and Krashen (1981) identify three variables which relate to learners’ being able to access the meaning of teacherpupil exchange:

• When learners’ motivation is high, they can take risks with expressing ideas, however tentative that expression may be.
• When learners have high self-confidence and good self-image, they tend to be more open to accepting adaptations to their everyday home language (L1) and to accepting a new language (L2).
• Low levels of personal and classroom anxieties are indispensable for the acquisition of both extended L1 and L2 language.

Personal empowerment through language and thinking fuelled by active engagement in Problemsolving

Wallace and Adams (1993b) maintain that successful teaching and acquisition of language, and the teaching of Problemsolving and thinking skills, are inseparably fused together and, consequently, share the same common aims and purposes:

• Both should seek to develop language and cognitive skills through purposeful real-life situations that provide learners with authentic and meaningful contexts for learning.
• Both should view the acquisition of language and learning to think effectively as active processes. It is not sufficient for learners to learn about them; they need to do something constructive with the acquired skills.
• Both should see language and thinking skills as vehicles for self-expression, personalisation and ownership of the learning processes.
• Both should see the development of language and thinking as skills to be used and transferred across the curriculum.
• Both should develop a curriculum and teaching/learning processes that develop learners’ positive self-image, internal locus of control, and the belief in lifelong learning.

The development of the TASC Project: Thinking Actively in a Social Context

Background

In 1984, Belle Wallace and Harvey Adams established the Curriculum Development Unit attached to the Faculty of Education, University of Natal, South Africa. They began a project which lasted for fifteen years, the overall aims of which were to research the needs of the disadvantaged Zulu population in the then apartheid Homeland of KwaZulu, to develop teachers’ and learners’ L1 and L2 language skills, to develop a range of appropriate thinking skills to promote self-esteem, independence and empowerment, and to design curricula which were relevant to and contextualized in Zulu culture. They worked within a spiral framework of action research, using a constructivist approach involving pupils, teachers, educational psychologists and parents or carers whenever possible. Importantly, Wallace and Adams did not work from a deficit framework of the skills the learners lacked, but from a framework of skills the learners already had: namely strong powers o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Concept map
• Introduction
• 1: Cognition and Underachievement
• 2: Bilingually Enriched Students
• 3: Culturally Diverse Students
• 4: Socio-Economic Class Issues
• 5: Ethnic Promise and Prejudice
• 6: Ethical Perspectives
• 7: Gender Issues
• 8: Exceptionality Issues
• 9: Developmental and Age Issues
• 10: Global Education Issues
• 11: International Profiles
• Conclusion
• Appendix