The evolution of creativity, giftedness, and multiple intelligences: an interview with Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner.

Ellen Winner is Professor of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1978. Her research focuses on learning and cognition in the arts in typical and gilled children. She is the author of over 100 articles and three books: Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts (Harvard University Press, 1982); The Point of Words: Children's Understanding of Metaphor and Irony (Harvard University Press, 1988); and Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (BasicBooks, 1997), which has been translated into six languages and was awarded the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award in Science. She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Research by a Senior Scholar in Psychology and the Arts from the American Psychological Association. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 10, Psychology and the Arts) and of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. She is currently studying the kinds of thinking skills taught in the visual arts, and the effects of music training on children's brain and cognitive development.

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. In 2004 he was named an Honorary Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in Education and in 2000 he received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2005, he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. He has received honorary degrees from twenty colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy, and Israel.

Henshon: What led you to the field of gifted education?

Winner: I am a cognitive development psychologist interested in how children develop in the arts. This interest led me to explore talent in the arts, which in turn led me to write a book about giftedness not only in the arts but also in other more traditionally studied areas such as verbal and mathematical abilities. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I discuss what research has shown about the nature of gifted children, as well as the research on approaches to educating gifted children.

When I graduated from college with a degree in literature, I wanted to become a painter. I had been drawn to the visual arts as a child, and this remained a passion for me as I grew up. After college, where I studied literature, I went on to study painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I only stayed there for a year because I decided I was not good enough to make it as an artist. I decided instead to become a research psychologist and to study the psychology of the arts. The study of the arts has never been mainstream in psychology, but that never bothered me.

I first studied children's understanding and use of metaphor in language, growing out of my studies of literature I'm sure, and this drew me to the study of irony (the other major form of figurative language besides metaphor). My research on children's misunderstandings drew me to the study of children's understandings of other's minds, since the stumbling block for irony understanding is figuring out the speaker's true beliefs and communicative intentions. My study in irony understanding got me interested in children's understanding of other's minds. At the same time as I studied irony, I began to study how children develop in drawing. It was by way of my study of children's artistic development that I began to study gifted children.

Howard's work has not focused directly on gifted education, and he has been misinterpreted as saying certain things about gifted education that he has never actually said. For example, some have said that Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences assumes that all children are gifted and therefore we don't need any programs for gifted. Of course he has never said this and there is nothing about the theory of multiple intelligences that leads to this conclusion.

Gardner: I think it is important to say that neither Ellen nor I have a background in gifted education or define ourselves as being expert in that area so there is a high potential for miscommunication.

It's as if we didn't belong to the club but various people in the club used us to "club" one another. Like Ellen, my background is in psychology-cognitive development and neuropsychology. I wasn't focused in education or giftedness and I wrote about the different types of intelligence. I saw that as a contribution to psychology but people who took it up were much more interested in education--special education, progressive education, people who were skeptical about standardized testing.

I have had a long time interest in creativity both in the arts and in other areas and I think Ellen and I would agree that you have to distinguish several concepts from one another. Intelligence and intelligences. Expertise. Giftedness, prodigiousness, creativity. These concepts are all different from each other, but lay people and many scholars lump them together. So let's work backwards.

Creativity, we believe, means doing something that changes a domain. Big "C" creativity refers to major domain changers such as Picasso and Einstein.

Expertise means doing something very well. It doesn't matter if your expertise came easy or if you had to work very hard to achieve it. Expertise differs from creativity because it doesn't change a domain.

I would use giftedness and talent interchangeably--both concepts refer to doing something in a domain (or more than one domain) better than other people when you are young, and learning easily and rapidly in this domain.

Winner: Yes, I too use the term giftedness in this way. If a child is gifted in some area, this means the child is able to do things in this area at a younger age than other children, and can learn more rapidly in this area compared to typical children.

Gardner: Prodigies are the extreme of giftedness. As David Feldman says, prodigies are tots who perform like grownups. They are obviously rare. One dispute in this field is the nature vs. nurture controversy. The other big dispute is: singularity vs. multiplicity. The extreme view is there is a general thing called giftedness--exemplified at the extreme by prodigies. According to this view, certain kids are gifted in everything and they are prodigious in everything. They are omnibus gifted, omnibus prodigious. All my work has aimed to demolish that notion of omnibus talent, expertise, intelligence. Most people are gifted in some things but not others. Almost all prodigies are prodigious in some things but not others.

The gifted community gets confused because it confuses scholastic giftedness with omnibus giftedness. Many people assume if you are good scholastically you are going to be very good at other things.

What I did for 20 years before developing my theory of multiple intelligences was to work with normal kids, gifted kids, and brain-damaged adults. On the basis of this empirical evidence, I concluded that the notion of unitary intelligence could not be sustained. I am not the first person to have that intuition. Human intellect is better described in terms of several capacities vs. one single one. When these ideas were encountered by the gifted education community, the people who took the Sidney Marland 1972 position were very pleased. People who had a vested interest in the theory of unitary intellect "g," as well as the parent community who wanted to make sure that their children got special privileges were not happy--I was not popular with the latter two groups.

The basic problem with America has been mediocre standards for everyone. Ellen and I agree that when you have limited resources for gifted education, these are better used for prodigious young people than for those who happen to have a 131 IQ.

The more we study countries with successful educational programs such as Finland, Japan, or Scandinavia, we learn the same thing. These countries achieve their success by having very high standards and very small standard deviations in statistical terms. In the US the distribution is huge. In Finland and Japan, the distribution is small.

Winner: These countries have more homogeneous populations and less poverty than we have. This makes it easier for schools to demand more.

Gardner: I want to make the point for plurality. The interesting thing is to watch what is happening in genetics and brain science, because within decades we will know what works and why. Brain studies and genetics will tell us a lot more about who is right and wrong in this intelligence warfare.

Henshon: What were the most important lessons that you learned (from a mentor)?

Gardner: I have just finished a 50-page essay on working with my mentors. There is a book coming out--Gardner Under Fire. In that volume, 15 people take whacks at me and I respond to them. I have been at Harvard for 45 years and I have had the good fortune to study with Erik Erickson, the great psychoanalyst and Jerome Bruner, the great cognitive psychologist who at age 90 is still a close friend. I have been lucky to have had wonderful mentors.

Winner: I had a wonderful advisor in graduate school who made a deep impression on me--Roger Brown. One thing I learned from Roger Brown was to ground my work in an interesting phenomenon. This is in contrast to another kind of research style, where you read literature and try to find a flaw in someone's study and redo the study correcting the flaw. There is a lot of research carried out in this vein. But this kind of research is not phenomenon based. I've always been interested in striking phenomena, and this explains my interest in prodigies. I'm fascinated by atypical children--which is why I've studied prodigies, and why I've been motivated to ask whether left-handers have more visual arts talent (they don't), whether dyslexics have greater spatial talent (the answer is mixed), and why I've been interested in the similarities between savants and prodigies.

Gardner: If you have been lucky enough to have good mentors, it is your obligation to try to mentor other people. It is kind of a mutual identification enterprise. People have to want to be mentored by you and you have to want to mentor them. You want to mentor at a high standard and sometimes it doesn't work--and then you have to minimize the damage. The hardest thing is to mentor people so that they will ultimately go their own way. The mistake most mentors make is to try to produce people who imitate them.

If you have a blend of mentors, you can take different properties from different people. If you only have one parent or mentor, or tormentor or anti-mentor, you are in much worse shape. It is an argument for multiple parents. Kids do benefit from having more relatives around.

Henshon: How have you influenced each other's work?

Winner: Howard's work on multiple intelligences has influenced my thinking about giftedness. When I think about giftedness I realize that one can be gifted in any intelligence. Therefore it makes little sense to talk about a child as gifted; it makes more sense to talk about a child as mathematically gifted, spatially gifted, verbally gifted, musically gifted, etc. This approach is consistent with a view of intelligences as independent of one another.

Gardner: Ellen has more of a critical scientific faculty than I am. I am more of a synthesizer and she is more of an analytic thinker. My art form is more music and Ellen's is more visual and literary. We read everything that each other writes and we critique each other's work. That is a big influence. If you are in the same field, you are telling one another about stuff you discover. I think that it is interesting which couples are in the same business and which ones are in different ones and don't talk about their work with one another.

Henshon: If you had to name individuals both in the field and maybe even outside the field who have had the greatest effect on your thinking, who would they be?

Winner: I know Julian Stanley had an influence on me because he argued against using overall IQ scores for admission to gifted programs and instead using either the SAT math or the SAT verbal score to determine entrance. Stanley was opposed to one all-purpose kind of gifted education, and so am I. The kind of education a child gifted in math needs is not the same as the kind a child gifted in the verbal domain needs. I've also been influenced by Oliver Sack's writings on savants, and by Rudolf Arnheim's writings on visual thinking.

Gardner: I think my honest answer is that most of writing in gifted education is quite limited. Take Terman and Cox. They focused too narrowly on IQ. And Cox thought that she could deduce IQs of eminent creators long dead. That is ridiculous. But I've been influenced by people outside the field of gifted education, people such as Howard Gruber for his focus on case studies, Dean Keith Simonton for his historiometric studies, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi for his studies of creative individuals, and David Feldman for his developmental approach.

Henshon: What other areas have held your interest over the years and how have they evolved?

Gardner: I don't ever lose an interest in something. I may put it aside for a while. My most recent work has been in professional ethics and trust and responsibility. Howard Gruber talked about scholars as having a network of enterprise. Nothing gets dropped but you can add new notes.

Henshon: Are there parts of those areas of interest that you just mentioned that are radically different in terms of your thinking about them now versus 15 years ago?

Winner: I actually haven't been in the field of gifted for 15 years. I wrote my book on giftedness in 1996 but I moved from there to an interest in the possible relationship between dyslexia and giftedness in the visual-spatial arena. I am now studying how music affects brain and cognitive development in young children with my collaborator Gottfried

Schlaug at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center at Harvard Medical School. We are scanning the brains of children as they start to study a musical instrument. One of the things we hope to find out from this study is whether there are any brain markers of musical giftedness prior to musical training. After following these children for several years, we will pick out those who emerge with talent and then look back at their brains to find out if they looked different from the start.

Henshon: What is some of the research that you're working on currently?

Gardner: If you go to HowardGardner.com or goodworkproject.org, you can get as much or little as you want. One thing I am working on is interdisciplinarity and synthesizing information. That is something that I don't think people have thought about much. Nowadays everyone is deluged with web information--but how do you decide what is important and how do you go about putting it together? One must be able to synthesize, and I'm interested in the science of synthesizing capacity.

Winner: I have two current projects. The first is the music/brain study I just mentioned. The second is a study, along with collaborators at Project Zero (Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema, Kim Sheridan) of the kinds of thinking dispositions that children learn when they study the visual arts seriously. This in turn grows out of earlier research I carried out with Lois Hetland in which we reviewed the literature on the claim that studying the arts boosts academic performance. We found very little evidence for this kind of "transfer" of learning from the arts to academic achievement. As a result, we set out to find out what kinds of thinking skills the arts really do foster. We found evidence of a number of these. When children study the visual arts they learn to observe; they learn to envision; they learn to reflect upon their working process and to make critical judgments; they learn to be playful and explore; and they learn to persevere. Children learn to be reflective in art class because of all the critique sessions.

Henshon: If you had to give someone advice on the things not to do in their research, what might some of that advice be ?

Gardner: Don't do what your professors do. Do what interests you. Don't be discouraged by rejections. Everyone gets them. Figure out what is your marginal advantage over others and push it and don't worry about what you are not good at. You can always get help.

Winner: Follow your passions. Find an area that is just beginning to be researched, and study that. Don't plunge into an area where there are already hundreds of researchers.

Henshon: What do you see as the most important questions that those types of studies could address?

Winner: One of the waves of the future will be the brain-basis of giftedness. I believe we will be asking about the brain basis of different kinds of gifts, whether in child prodigies or in autistic savants. We have very little research on the question so far. Yes, we have the brain of Einstein, but you can't conclude very much from one brain, even the brain of Einstein.

Henshon: Is there any area of research being conducted on any of those areas that you've just mentioned in the field of gifted education?

Winner: I keep waiting for people to image the brains of savants. I think this would be a fascinating thing to look at. But none of this is easy to do. You have to have proper control brains.

Henshon: What's happened as far as research in the field of gifted education that you think should receive more attention than it has?

Gardner: I have been studying good work. Good work is defined as something that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to the worker. We know a lot about the first and not a great deal about the other two. Nothing about how to put them together. That could keep a lot of people productively busy and it is worth a lot more than another study demonstrating the importance of g or documenting differences in g across gender, race, and ethnicity. The second is that we must ask why so many people would rather study the g of general intelligence than the g of good work.

Winner: We pay very little attention to any form of giftedness besides academic giftedness. We have very little arts education in our schools, and there is therefore very little our schools can provide for children gifted in the arts. I'd also like to see advanced classes for children in all areas starting as early as the elementary-school years. If a child is advanced in math, why can't that child take an advanced math class (or take math with older children) but remain with his/her peers for other subjects in which he or she is not as advanced? I'd like to see children self-select into advanced classes rather than have to pass some kind of arbitrary cut off in a test score to get in. No child is going to self-select into something too difficult.

Henshon: How do you feel your work (in multiple intelligences, visual arts) has been interpreted in the field?

Winner: In my book I argued that we could solve the gifted education problem by doing two things. First, we should have higher expectations and more challenging curriculum for all children. Then the moderately gifted would not be clamoring for pull-out gifted programs. Second, for those rare children who are years ahead of their peers in one or more domains, we should provide advanced classes. Unfortunately some people only heard the second part of the argument and felt that I was abandoning the moderately gifted child.

Gardner: Ellen's work in the arts has been very controversial. There is a lot of folk wisdom that if you study the arts it will make you smarter in school. Ellen along with Lois Hetland has shown via meta-analyses that training in the arts doesn't improve your verbal and math test scores. She pointed out that we need to justify the arts on the basis of what they teach, and not on the bogus claim that they will lead to higher SAT scores. This got a lot of arts advocates very upset.

Winner: Yes, my research on arts education showed that there is a real clash between science and advocacy. Arts advocates want to use the claim that arts will boost test scores whether or not there is any evidence for this claim.

Gardner: In England there is a correlation between studying the arts and doing poorly on academic tests. In the US we find just the opposite--a correlation between studying the arts and doing well academically. But what Ellen and her colleagues pointed out is that neither one of these allows a causal conclusion. In this country we counsel strong students to take arts classes--to make themselves attractive to top colleges. In the UK the academically weak students are counseled to take the arts and stay out of the academic track. That's why the correlations look different in the US and the UK.

Winner: People confuse correlation with causation. I wish people would read the original sources and get the argument straight.

One of my concerns about gifted education is the superficiality of most programs. Typically gifted programs are pullout programs a couple times a week. The programs are not tailored differently for students with different kinds of abilities. Thus a child gifted in math goes to the same pullout program as a child gifted in the verbal area. And neither child gets advanced training in her area of giftedness.

Gardner: In many ways a scientific theory like MI is like a Rorschach test in the educational world. People find what they are looking for to support what they already believe. I have seen how my ideas are used all over the world and typically the use shows more about the user than about my theory. I went to China in 2004 and I learned that there are over a hundred books in Chinese about multiple intelligences. A journalist told me that in the US people like MI theory because it tells them that every child is special. In China the 8 intelligences are 8 things parents need to make EVERY kid good at.

I think I am very lucky because most scholars don't have the opportunity to change the conversation at all. I think I have been part of a small group that has challenged psychometricians who believe that they alone have the right to define intelligence and how it should be assessed.

Winner: I confess that I do not much like the word gifted. I think this word creates resentment. I'd rather talk about children who are in need of advanced classes in math, or in English, or in history.

Dr. Suzanna E. Henshon graduated from the College of William & Mary in 2005, and now teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her first novel for gifted readers, Mildew on the Wall, was published by Royal Fireworks Publishing Company in 2004. E-mail: [e-mail]