‘I ask myself: but are they really gifted?’. Genius and giftedness at school
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7346/-fei-XVIII-03-20_27Abstract
Teachers’ perspectives reveal some beliefs that would play a fundamental role in orienting teaching intervention in everyday life (Vannini, 2012). The present study investigated in particular the perceptions of some teachers on the idea of giftedness and the interpretations of the clinical document attesting giftedness, through psychological tests. Giftedness, according to some teachers, would mainly concern having above average intellectual abilities (Robinson, Ziegler and Gallagher, 2000); while, according to others, it would be defined with aspects of personality, such as motivation and creativity (Speirs Neumeister et al. (2007). Our data confirmed those that already emerged from the scientific literature, even if it seems that some Italian teachers integrated the relational dimension to define giftedness, adopting a perspective of disharmony. The interpretations on the clinical evaluation of giftedness offered a varied range of perceptions: it is a tool to know better the pupil; a confirmation of what the teacher suspected; a useful document to protect the rights of gifted children; however, in some cases, the assessment is questioned as there would be no correspondence between the teacher’s expectations (all posi-tive and very high) and the classroom attitude of the child considered. In this sense, a romantic vision of genius remains: the gifted child would be who excels.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors that publish in Formazione & insegnamento accept the following conditions:
- Authors keep their copy rights for their work and give the journal only the right of first publication and distribution of it. Concurrently, the work is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which allows others to share their work porovided they attribute it to their original author and acknowledge its first appearance in this journal.
- Authors might engage in other licensing agreements, provided such agreements are non exclusive regarding the distribution of the published work (e.g., place a copy in a physical institutional repository, or publish it in a book). In this case, the authors must acknowledge in the new version of the work that it was first published on this journal.
- Authors may distribute their accepted manuscripts (pre-print) online (e.g., online repositories, personal website) during the publication process. This is allowed because it is the source of informed exchange with peers and increases the value of the published work. Please be aware that the distribution and dissemination to peer and through archives does not constitute a "publication" in a volume belonging to a series (ISSN): Formazione & insegnamento publishes previously unpublished works.