The Palgrave Handbook of Transformational Giftedness for Education (eBook)

This handbook examines what education would look like if it prepared gifted students to transform the world-to make it a better place for all, not just for those who receive extra resources from schools in return for being labeled as 'gifted.' The editors explore how transformationally gifted people can seek to make the world a better and more just place: they try to make a positive, meaningful, and possibly enduring contribution to changing things in the world that are not working. They do not view 'giftedness' merely as a transaction whereby, in exchange for being labeled as 'gifted,' they accrue benefits to themselves: such as a more prestigious education, more income, or residence in a more exclusive community. The overarching aim of this book is to present conceptions of what identification and instruction of the gifted would look like if the focus of gifted education was transformational rather than transactional. What if gifted education did not focus so much on acceleration vs. enrichment, or pull-out versus in-class integration, but rather on how to be gifted in giving back-in using one's gifts to create a better world?

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, USA, and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He was cited in an APA Monitor on Psychology report as one of the top 100 psychologists of the 20th century and in a report in Archives of Scientific Psychology by Diener and colleagues as one of the top 200 psychologists of the modern era.

Don Ambrose is Professor of Graduate Education at Rider University USA, and editor of the Roeper Review, an international research journal serving the field of gifted education. In his interdisciplinary work he explores the conceptual terrain of more than 30 academic disciplines and professional fields to mine constructs relevant to creative intelligence.

Sareh Karami is Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Mississippi State University, USA. She worked for more than ten years in the Iranian Gifted School as the head of the Research Department.