Professor Marcia Gentry Walked the Talk

ABSTRACT

Our colleague, Professor Marcia Gentry, left us too soon. Thankfully, her professional legacy lives through her scholarship. Likewise, her impact on family and friends endures through her timeless gentleness of spirit. This essay reviews Professor Gentry’s decades-long quest for equity and excellence as markers of our field. Toward this end, Marcia proposed that professionals in the highly specialized niche area of gifted education retire the words gifted and giftedness and focus on excellence and talent development. A core value for Marcia was the belief that equitable access to talent development is fundamentally an issue of social justice. In response, I suggest that we consider how to retire these terms from the vantage point of five pivots, ultimately shifting from gifted education to talent discovery and development thereby promoting equity through excellence. The fifth pivot briefly discusses why we must shift from a nearly exclusive educational perspective to one that incorporates psychological components, including developmental and educational psychological principles.

KEYWORDS:

• equity
• excellence
• giftedness
• identification
• megamodel of talent development
• talent development
• talent search

Acknowledgments

This essay was written in Denver, Colorado. I want to acknowledge and affirm Indigenous sovereignty, history, and experiences. May this acknowledgment demonstrate a commitment to working to dismantle ongoing legacies of oppression and inequities and recognize the current and future contributions of Indigenous communities in Denver and throughout the world. I am grateful to the editors of this special issue for this opportunity to pay tribute to Dr. Marcia Gentry through a brief review of her oeuvre regarding excellence, equity, and social justice. This opportunity allowed me to reaffirm for myself, and hopefully for the reader, the necessity of carefully considering how the words gifted and giftedness have impacted our field. It is time to pivot from gifted and giftedness to talent discovery and development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Discussing the definition of gifted and talented is beyond the scope of this essay; however, the 1972 Marland Report recognized that “these are children who require differentiated educational programs … beyond those normally provided by the regular school program … Children capable of high performance include demonstrated achievement and/or potential ability in … (a) general intellectual ability; (b) specific academic aptitude; (c) creative or productive thinking; (d) leadership ability; (e) visual and performing arts; (f) psychomotor ability [later removed] (p. ix). Rinn et al. (2022, see page 15) cite the most current federal definition, which reveals that little has changed over a 50-yr period. Perhaps the definition is not the issue, rather how we choose to operationalize the definition?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan G. Assouline

Susan G. Assouline is Director Emerita of the Belin-Blank Center, and Distinguished Professor Emerita of School Psychology and Blank Endowed Chair in Gifted Education. Throughout her career, her research revolved around identification of academic talent, academic acceleration, and twice-exceptionality. Her work in twice-exceptionality started with a collaboration with current Belin-Blank Center Director Megan Foley-Nicpon. Her work in talent discovery and development began with Professor Julian Stanley in 1988. In 2015, she co-edited with Nicholas Colangelo, Joyce VanTassel-Baska, and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students. In 2016 she received the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) 2016 Distinguished Scholar Award. Email: [email protected]