From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to Volume 41, Issue 2 of the Roeper Review. The articles in this issue explore some ways in which students and educators perceive gifted education and gifted young people; the inner workings of creativity and innovation; and some nuances of dual exceptionality. The issue has a distinctive international flavor, drawing insights from Finland, Australia, Peru, South Korea, Spain, Vietnam, and Jordan.

In their article, “Finnish Elementary School Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Gifted Education,” Sonja Laine, Risto Hotulainen, and Kirsi Tirri explore beliefs about gifted education in Finland, which is one of the world’s most egalitarian nations and one of the most successful in terms of educational achievement in general. They show how beliefs that Finnish teachers have about gifted education vary when it comes to specific provisions such as differentiation and acceleration.

The next analysis in this issue shows the results of a large-scale, international investigation reported by Hyerim Oh, Margaret Sutherland, Niamh Stack, Mar Badia Martín, Sheyla Blumen, Quoc Anh-Thu Nguyen, Catherine Wormald, Julie Maakrun, and Albert Ziegler. In their article, “Adolescent Perception of Potential High-Performing Classmates: A Cross-National Exploration,” the authors illustrate interesting, varied perspectives on giftedness emerging in five nations.

Manoj Chandra Handa gives us the results of another perspective taking initiative in the article “Leading Differentiated Learning for the Gifted.” The analysis illustrated some differences between Australian principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of differentiation processes while establishing some recommendations for instructional leadership.

Kyung Hee Kim takes us on a wide-ranging journey through a field that shows considerable overlap with gifted education in her article, “Demystifying Creativity: What Creativity Isn’t and Is?” She illustrates some leading misconceptions about creativity while describing how creative thought processes can develop into productive innovation.

Dual exceptionality has been attracting more attention in our field in recent years. In the article “Dynamic Assessment for Identification of Twice-Exceptional Learners Exhibiting Mathematical Giftedness and Specific Learning Disabilities,” Anies Al-Hroub and David Whitebread magnify this topic by portraying the complexity of identification processes aimed at the discovery of dual exceptionality in connection with a particular academic domain.

Each issue of the Roeper Review also includes a couple of interviews shedding light on the cognitive processes, motivational dynamics, and talent development of impressive, creative individuals. One of these outstanding creators is a pioneering scholar in the field of gifted education, or a related field, and the other is an expert in a particular domain. In this issue, the featured leading scholar is Vlad Petre Glăveanu, a groundbreaking researcher investigating creativity. Vlad has come to prominence due to his work on the creative imagination, collaboration, and culture as well as his leadership of large-scale collaborative projects involving many of the world’s leading creativity researchers. The expert interviewed in this issue is Brian Kloc, a highly creative development artist producing visual effects for major films. His work is prominent in the amazing special effects now coming out of the moviemaking industry. You are sure to have seen his work in some of the most high-profile Hollywood productions.

Our book review editor, Sakhavat Mammadov, provides Chandra Floyd’s review of Developing Creativity in the Classroom: Learning and Innovation for 21st-Century Schools, which was written by Todd Kettler, Kristen N. Lamb, and Dianna R. Mullet.

Finally, to encourage interdisciplinary thinking, I conclude the introduction to each issue of the Roeper Review with a brief discussion of insights from an outside discipline. The interdisciplinary insights for this issue come from work in economics; interestingly, though most economists confine themselves to the mechanistic nuts and bolts of financial transactions, some have been exploring the ways in which economic pressures influence behavior relevant to giftedness and talent development.

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AUTHORITARIAN AND PERMISSIVE PARENTING DRIVEN BY ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Too often, contextual influences are ignored in contemplation of giftedness, talent development, creativity, intelligence, and educational performance in general. Socioeconomic contexts exert considerable influences on human behavior, performance, and achievement throughout the life span. Though our field pays attention to some of these influences, especially parental influence (e.g., Jolly & Matthews, 2017, 2018; Olszewski-Kubilius, 2016; Olszewski-Kubilius, Lee, & Thomson, 2014; Witte, Kiewra, Kasson, & Perry, 2015), we can benefit from following relevant research done in other disciplines. Especially interesting insights arise from the work of prominent economists Doepke and Zilibotti (2019). Their analyses show that parenting takes very different forms in various nations due to economic pressures. In the United States and China, parents are becoming more authoritarian, whereas parenting in Scandinavian nations is more permissive. The authors determined that economic constraints and incentives are largely responsible for these differences. Working-class and impoverished parents in highly unequal nations lack the resources and time necessary to provide effective, nuanced guidance to their children, so they end up becoming authoritarian out of necessity. These parents are too busy running between two or three low-paying jobs, and they are distracted by intense worrying about making ends meet. Meanwhile, affluent parents in these nations worry about ensuring that their children move into the highest academic paths to ensure their long-term success, so they also become authoritarian. But in the more egalitarian nations, parents have far more flexibility. They know that their children will benefit from second chances if they try and fail in an economy that has robust social safety nets such as generous unemployment insurance, strongly subsidized university programs, universal health insurance, and much more. Consequently, they are inclined to allow their children to pursue interests that aren’t directly connected with monetary success. For example, if a child wants to be an artist, a parent likely will support that aspiration instead of forcing her to aim at a lucrative career in the financial industry.

Researchers, theorists, and practitioners in gifted education would be well advised to consider the extent to which these economic pressures have shaped conceptions and practices in the field. Is the strong persistence of hyper-mechanistic conceptions of giftedness (Sternberg, 2017) sustained by the chronic stress that parents and children face in the United States due to the severe inequality they confront (see Cabieses, Pickett, & Wilkinson, 2016; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009)? Is the excessive emphasis on easily measured but somewhat barren performance indicators in gifted education and general education largely due to these economic pressures and constraints? Is Tirri’s (2016) observation that education in Finland emphasizes creative and critical thinking, leadership, collaboration, aesthetic appreciation, and other “soft” skills instead of collapsing into a frenzied chase for superficial, mechanistic achievement scores primarily due to the more egalitarian nature of that society?……….

Thanks to the reviewers who refine and strengthen the literature in our field and to the insightful researchers and theorists who publish their work in our journal. If you plan to contribute an article to the Roeper Review, see our author guidelines on our website: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=uror20

Don Ambrose, PhD, Editor, Roeper Review

Professor of Graduate Education

Graduate Department, School of Education

College of Liberal Arts, Education, and SciencesRider University

2083 Lawrenceville Road

Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-3099

[email protected]