This issue honors Annemarie Roeper -- a gifted teacher and teacher of the gifted.

The following letter is Linda Silverman's 1999 nomination of Annemarie to the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Award Committee.

It gives me great pleasure to support the nomination of Dr. Annemarie Roeper for NAGC's Distinguished Service Award. An early member of the NAGC board, founder of the Global Awareness Division, co-founder of Roeper Review, and co-founder of the oldest school for the gifted in the country in continuous operation, Annemarie has been a major force in the field of gifted education for over 50 years. Her books, Educating Children for Life: The Modern Learning Community, and Annemarie Roeper: Selected Writings and Speeches, describe her child-centered philosophy, recently heralded by Grant and Piechowski in Gifted Child Quarterly as the most important contemporary theory of the education and development of the child. A prolific writer, Annemarie's many articles introduced new constructs to the field. Among them, How Gifted Children Cope with Their Emotions, published in 1982, inaugurated the study of emotional giftedness. Her article, Gifted Adults: Their Characteristics and Emotions provided a basis for the study of giftedness in adults.

Annemarie's contributions extend outside the field of gifted education. In 1966, she co-authored a most important research study with Irving Sigel, a leading Piagetian scholar, in Young Children: Finding the Clue to Children's Thought Processes. They established that gifted children, at the age of five or younger, can learn the Piagetian property of conservation through direct instruction. Many researchers still believe children cannot conserve until the age of eight, that the cognitive principle of conservation cannot be taught, and that the gifted do not progress through Piaget's developmental stages at a faster rate. A second article based on this research was published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology in 1966. Twenty years later, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) declared the second paper a classic, indicating that the article had been cited in over 50 publications, making it the most cited paper ever published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Annemarie and George Roeper began The Roeper School in Detroit in 1941. In 1956, they sponsored the Gifted Child Institute, inviting a group of 8 distinguished leaders in gifted education to spend a week at the school to convert it into a school for the gifted. Dr. Harry Passow chaired that committee. Harry wrote, We were being asked by the Roepers to design a school of our dreams! And dream we did that week as we explored every aspect of what a school for the gifted should be - from its guiding philosophy, to the selection of its students, to its curriculum design and instructional strategies, to its staffing, to its overall ethos and climate. We made our plans fully expecting that George and Annemarie would implement them, and we were not disappointed. While the school is known as a school for the gifted, what Annemarie Roeper is advocating is appropriate for all children. The cooperative, nonhierarchial philosophy and system of education which is embodied in The Roeper School, has meaning for all educators in the modern learning community. (Passow, 1990).

Annemarie's influence has been far-reaching. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Roeper School and was so impressed that she invited Annemarie and George to her apartment in Manhattan shortly afterwards. The creators of Sesame Street consulted with Annemarie in designing their grant application, and Annemarie's ideas were influential in getting the program funded. In 1998, a series of national seminars on the Self of the child were launched honoring Annemarie's philosophy. In an article enumerating Annemarie's many contributions, Dr. James Delisle (1991) wrote, Annemarie has written what is, to me, the most comprehensive and common sense definition of giftedness in our literature: Giftedness is a greater awareness, a greater sensitivity, and a greater ability to understand and transform perceptions into intellectual and emotional experiences.

A survivor of the Holocaust, Annemarie lost everything she treasured, including the opportunity to work directly with Anna and Sigmund Freud as the youngest person ever accepted to study psychoanalysis. She and George brought with them to America the conviction that they had the personal responsibility to help make this a more peaceful, cooperative planet. Their loss of a homeland was mirrored in the tragedy of the Oakland (California) fire, on October 20, 1991, when Annemarie saved George's life. Except for the clothes on their backs and her purse, all their belongings, including years of writings, were lost. In her purse was a ticket to the 38th convention of the National Association for Gifted Children, November 9th. Deeply in grief, Annemarie honored her commitment to NAGC and attended the conference, delivering moving addresses on The Impact of World Conflict on Gifted Children and The Potential for Higher Moral Development. These are the kinds of issues that have absorbed Annemarie's energies for most of her 80 years. This is the depth of her contributions to the field and to the lives of gifted children. She reminds us that gifted children are not simply producers or potential producers; they are human beings imbued with greater sensitivity, greater awareness, greater complexity, greater sense of responsibility for the whole of humanity.

Annemarie advocates that we infuse curriculum for the gifted with a focus on ethics, helping students grapple with the following questions: Should decisions be made on the basis of personal goals? When does obedience stop being ethical? Is the majority always ethically right? Is team spirit always the final deciding factor? What is loyalty? Is it always ethically right? Does the end justify the means? On what principles do we base our decisions? How do we make our decisions? Do we look at problems from all sides? (Roeper, 1987)

In her often quoted article, Empathy, Ethics, and Global Education, Annemarie (1989) wrote:

The gifted are global thinkers and are apt to see the whole before they concern themselves with the details. The gifted are complex thinkers and are better able than others to discern the intricacies of interdependence. They are concept-oriented and have an enormous desire to make sense of this world, to master it, and to make an impact on it. They are also research-minded; they want to find out because of their inner need for intellectual and emotional order. They are interested in the past and are very concerned with the future.

All of these characteristics lead them toward the concept of interdependence. It is now up to us to open the door for them and help them make sense of these concepts. The gifted are our hope for the future. They are our hope for the discovery and development of the laws of interdependence, which will enable them to lead this world toward a better future.

This is one small sample of the contributions of Annemarie Roeper to the field. It is my sincere hope that the National Association for Gifted Children will honor her with the Distinguished Service Award. I cannot think of anyone more deserving.

Sincerely,

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D.