Expanding our conceptual horizons.

A leading biologist, Bentley Glass, once declared that "[scientists] are like the explorers of a great continent who have penetrated to its margins in most points of the compass and have mapped the major mountain chains and rivers. There are still innumerable details to fill in, but the endless horizons no longer exist" (cited in Holgan, 1996, p. 24). John Wheeler, an eminent physicist, expressed an opposing viewpoint: "As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance" (cited in Horgan, 1996, p. 83). It is puzzling to see one prominent scientist claiming that our knowledge is virtually complete and another saying that most major discoveries still await us.

Similar arguments can be made about discovery in the field of education for the gifted and talented. Are we simply filling in details because we have resolved most of the big issues or are we still expanding the shores of our map of human ability? This special issue aligns with Wheeler's contention that there still is much to discover, and the more we discover the more we need to learn. It represents a concerted response to repeated calls for more expansive thinking about phenomena in the field of gifted education. Members of the Conceptual Foundations Division of the National Association for Gifted Children have advocated persistently for new research and theory that challenges or extends current thinking in the field. Fortunately, Tracy Cross reached out to the division and that catalyzed a large-scale investigative project culminating in this collection of adventurous, exploratory articles.

This project generated some very large-scale analytic frameworks for considerations of giftedness and talent. The first two articles use the notion of levels of analysis to suggest new ways of grappling with the cognitive complexity of the field. I introduce the issue with the framing paper, "Interdisciplinary Expansion of Conceptual Foundations: Insights From Beyond Our Field." Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I delineate six levels of analysis at which insights about giftedness, talent, and creativity are accessible. These levels, ranging from the macro-perspectives of socioeconomic, cultural, historical, and political influences to the micro-perspectives of the cellular, molecular-atomic, and subatomic realms, provide unique and necessary vantage points on the complexities of human potential. Excessive emphasis on one or a few levels can leave us with incomplete understandings about important phenomena in the field.

David Dai also considers multiple levels of analysis, placing theories of giftedness along a conceptual continuum in his paper "Reductionism Versus Emergentism: A Framework for Understanding Conceptions of Giftedness." The levels of analysis include the biological at the extreme reductionist end of the continuum through the operational and intentional levels to the activity level at the extreme emergentist end. Dai maps theories of intelligence along the continuum according to their particular approaches and the phenomena they address. His mapping shows that theories and conceptions at opposite ends of the continuum can produce radically different perspectives on giftedness and contrasting implications for educational policy and practice.

One other article addresses the field from a panoramic perspective. In the paper, "Philosophical Sense: An Ampliative Twist in Gifted Education," Robert Schultz provides a refreshing look at the big-picture philosophical and contextual dimensions of the field. He discusses problems of fragmentation, insularity, excessive political influence, and insufficient scholarly attention to historical and philosophical contexts. Without philosophical awareness in the field, we remain vulnerable to the harms of ill-conceived standards-based reforms. He also advocates more attention to unification of the field on common conceptual ground. This unification can come only after insightful philosophical analyses.

The issue concludes with four articles that present new theoretical perspectives or import insights from other disciplines to shed light on creativity, the subjective dimensions of mind, tacit assumptions based on category formation, and linguistic development. John Baer and James Kaufman clarify the controversy over domain specificity in creativity with their article "Bridging Generality and Specificity: The Amusement Park Theoretical (APT) Model of Creativity." Their broad-scope model encompasses perspectives that describe creativity as similar across domains of human endeavor and those that portray it as dependent on the unique demands of differing domains. Their amusement park metaphor enables perception of differing requirements for creative work, from the very general initial requirements to those of very specific micro-domains. While providing a helpful framework for integration of divergent conceptions of creativity, the model also promises guidance for creativity training and assessment, as well as selection of students for gifted programs.

In the article, "Depth Psychology and Giftedness: Bringing Soul to the Field of Talent Development and Giftedness," Christopher Reynolds and Jane Piirto reach deep into the subjective dimensions of mind by connecting giftedness and talent with emerging insights from depth psychology. While mind-related fields typically devote much attention to conscious rationality, explorations of the unconscious can reveal intuitive, aesthetic aspects of human potential that are necessary for the highest levels of development and achievement. The authors show how these dimensions of mind, which are ignored too often in our field, can prod an individual into discovering interests and a compelling sense of purpose.

Erin Morris Miller also travels across disciplines, borrowing theories and concepts from cognitive psychology and using them to formulate recommendations for clarification of identification issues in the article "The Meaning of Giftedness: Inspiration From the Field of Cognitive Psychology." Employing various notions of concept and category formation from cognitive psychology, she explores the ways in which teachers' individual theories of giftedness may be aggravating the problem of minority underrepresentation in programs for the academically gifted. In essence, her paper is an intriguing venture into some tacit assumptions that strongly influence the ways in which educators of the gifted think and work.

In the article, "The Linguistic Advantage of the Intellectually Gifted Child: An Empirical Study of Spontaneous Speech," Pau-San Hoh borrows from yet another discipline, studying the linguistic development of a young, gifted, bilingual child and analyzing the findings by comparison with patterns in language acquisition research. Hoh demonstrates some nuances of accelerated linguistic development while positing some interesting connections among the linguistic, cognitive, and psycho-social dimensions of giftedness. This analysis also lends some weight to domain-transcendent conceptions of high ability.

This issue will encourage you to think in new ways about giftedness, talent, and creativity. Instead of filling in the details of an already completed conceptual map, it invites vigorous exploration of our ever-expanding shores of knowledge.

--Don Ambrose, Guest Editor

REFERENCE

Horgan, J. (1996). The end of science: Facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.