"BEING GIFTED IN A MAINSTREAM COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY"
ABSTRACT
The social setting of the community of inquiry may not suit every learner. Established personal learning styles may not favour it. Clearly some extensive learning is done individually; it may be likely that Maths and Science students prefer such individual learning methods. Ellerton and Bigum (1987:26) report "that children preferred to work on their own ideas rather than 'learn' what we wanted to 'teach' them." In short, personal discovery learning was their preferred mode of learning. Older successful science students seem to prefer this learning style too. Indeed it may be that autonomous learning ("gifted learning") is best for the gifted and talented child and that participating in the community of inquiry methodology can be a living denial of such a student's faster learning pace and need for deeper content.
It was not long, however, before something disturbed his attention. Nineteen of the young plants were growing in the expected way, but the twentieth plant was growing irregularly - fast at first, then more slowly than the others. And then, just as he had begun to think that there was something wrong with it, the plant had shown powerful new spurts of growth in different directions, and had quite a different appearance.
It seemed to be trying to reach the sun itself, so tall and strong did it now grow in its sunny window, although the vigour of its growth did make it a bit lopsided. It had thrust a stout tap root from the bottom of its pot, seeming to refuse the confines in which it had been placed, instead searching, reaching, stretching for more light, water, and nourishment than had been provided. Why was it so different?
The gardener studied its expanding leaves and the firm, brownish trunk which was so unlike a green and pliant bean stem. He considered its irrepressible growing tip. And the gardener realised that this was a tree seedling, not a bean plant. The little seeds had been so similar at the start that only by the unusual growth of this one had he learned the truth. He was nurturing nineteen beans which he wanted and could care for easily, and one tree!
But the gardener didn't really want a tree! To grow a tree properly would require adjustments of many kinds on his part, and it was a more long-term investment of money, planning, and care than he liked to anticipate. Furthermore, the value of a tree would not be evident for years, and the tree would surely outgrow the gardener's little pot one day soon. Couldn't he just take the easy way and keep the emerging tree right there in the flower pot, letting it do whatever it could? He could regularly snip any searching roots and outreaching branch tips in the ancient manner, and patiently train it to accept his sunlit window, pot of soil, and measured nutrients. He could make a bonsai tree, a perfect little well-pruned miniature!"
I believe this story dramatises the plight of some talented children who are forced to deny their differentnesses so as to live comfortably in our society. "Gifted and talented" for instance, often find it is far better to hide their gifts and talents and settle for an uncomfortable compromise of mediocrity. The resulting risk of poor mental health for them is well documented (M. Gross). The parable also highlights the powerful role of the teacher as the gardener with fixed expectations.
I also quote this story today to illustrate the dilemma many educators experience in dealing with gifted children. Some try to deny they are gifted, saying they are just not there: "There's no one gifted in our school" as one primary school principal was once heard to retort. Any reports that there may be gifted children are sometimes dealt with by derision or by indifference. Others may acknowledge their presence among us but bemoan the scarce resources provided to cater for them claiming this as a cover for not catering for them. Others parody the issue as just a political toy for conservative politicians and administrators.
But the fact is that being gifted is real, a 24 hour a day living package and it hurts. It is a life time sentence, a bundle of vulnerabilities bringing its own misunderstandings and distinctive problems. Silverman (1988) highlights this different quality of existence in her comment:
Gifted children are particularly vulnerable because they react in an intensified manner to experience . . . The unique characteristics of the gifted - supersensitivity, perceptiveness, perfectionism and self-criticism - furnish ample opportunities for them to feel inadequate, despite the number of successful achievements to their credit.
Being gifted then requires not just a different quality of education, but a differential kind of education appropriate to cater for its distinctive characteristics. If it is so important then, how many are we talking about? Can we afford it?
WHAT POPULATION ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
Some define high aptitude by test performance (e.g., talented 15% and gifted are 3% of a peer population), and others say gifted are 1% of the general population in general intelligence. The Renzulli definition (1977) recognises giftedness as a tripartite phenomenon with three interacting behaviours: well above average intelligence, high levels of task commitment, and high levels of creativity. Assiniboine South region (Canada) embraces the following definition:
- Gifted and talented children are those who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of exceptional performance. These children, who have exceptional needs, require extended educational planning, accommodations, and services in order to assist in meeting those needs and thereby realizing their potential contribution to self and society. (http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/~mstimson/text/paper/definition.html)
Tannenbaum (1983) believes many elements are necessary for giftedness: "stimulating home, school and community settings are indispensable not only for maximising potentialities but also for helping to determine directions they take." The following table (Parke, 1989:19) lists many observable features of gifted children and adolescents:
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COGNITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GIFTED
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AFFECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GIFTED
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CREATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GIFTED
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Parke's lists suggest that gifted children work at a faster pace, are interested in cosmic concerns, have a more more holistic view, enjoy challenges, and have more personal sensitivities and vulnerabilities than others. The dilemma is that these traits can both enrich our communities of inquiry and as well act as hindrances to full participation in them.
So our topic here addressed is "the experiential situation of the academically gifted child in a mainstream classroom community of inquiry" or in other words, how to include the gifted child as a full member of the mainstream classroom community of inquiry; my purpose is not to identify or justify giftedness. It is the concern here to find ways and justifications to draw out the extraordinary abilities, interests and creativity of the one or two in the average twenty-five in our classroom communities of inquiry
This inquiry also applies to others in our philosophy 'classes' who come to the community without the developed verbal abilities, with different cultural backgrounds or social customs that we presume in our liberal-democratic tradition. Children who come from other cultural traditions where an open expression of one's opinions is not encouraged or even denied (such as boys in Asian or girls in Middle Eastern societies) will need specific encouragement to change their cultural training learnt at home so they can participate in the classroom community of inquiry at school. Similarly, it may be asked: are others in our classes who say, suffer physical or mental handicaps or come from other a nonverbal or non-individualistic class or cultural backgrounds, unable to enjoy the benefits of participation in the community of inquiry? Our focus on the gifted child is just one subset within this range of categories represented in our student populations who may be experiencing difficulties operating well in philosophy for children classes as we practise them.
The focus is here on what could be loosely called the "plight" of the gifted child in the classroom community of inquiry. Typically, gifted children have learned to become distrustful of chronological peers, preferring and enjoying the company of intellectual peers (e.g., adults) instead. I am suggesting that such gifted children, rather than excelling in the rich interchange of talk, may find the community's social setting dissatisfying, the pace of discussion too slow and the treatment of issues banal. I have observed such children quietly withdraw from discussions for all these reasons in particular. So I offer this paper in the hope that discussion of such individuals' interests and preferred modes of learning will alert us to their plight so that their peer relationships within the community of inquiry may become stronger and more beneficial to them and to other participants too. In acknowledging their talents, our communities of inquiry will be much more inclusive and stronger for these very individuals' commitments to them.
MEETING CLAIMS FOR THE COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY
The community of inquiry makes strong claims to be inclusive. It is said that in the community of inquiry everyone has a place, everyone is respected, every view is voiced. However I question just how true these claims are realised. Inevitably, any community of inquiry will be no better than its home culture's most common social norms and mores: instance the difficulties girls report being taken seriously in co-educational science classes. Are the racial barriers any less impermeable in the philosophical circle? I would argue that such social forces will be just as strongly operational in the community of inquiry as they are in the pervading culture surrounding it. The community of inquiry inevitably expresses major features of the local culture of its school or community location.
Would the solution be to form a so-called gifted community of inquiry within a school? It would be a group of mental peers who can accept and respect one another's thoughts and achievements. After all, the community of inquiry is derived from the international community of scholarship that Lipman admired. If we accept such a community of minds within a school as the organisational solution for the gifted child, then are we denigrating something about current communities of inquiry as they are practised?
I think we must reject this solution as being elitist, apart from its being impracticable too. The very idea of a community means that everyone has the right to input. But I propose this 'solution' to highlight the crux of this issue: how is the gifted child to benefit greatly from the mainstream classroom's community of inquiry?
ADVANTAGES FOR THE GIFTED CHILD
For the gifted child, the community of inquiry could be a highly advantageous learning experience. For the academically and verbally talented, it very much offers an intellectual or academic focus which favours gifted whose principal interests are academic and intellectual.
But it seems the community of inquiry primarily prizes social learning. It could be a major emotional shift and advantage to trust one's own peers to accept one's own ideas and embark on quality discussion where one has always experienced stimulation from the adult world. Enjoying the stimulation of the local classroom community as social event could be a welcome counterpoint to seeking intellectual stimulation from books.
If a gifted child has an adult mentor, he or she has one trusted listener with whom to articulate such creativity. For the gifted child this can be a perennial problem; there may be no one to listen to the bizarre, the zany or 'silly' ideas he or she has. However, if the gifted child could find the community of inquiry accepting, she could find it to be a useful proving ground to test out "ridiculous" ideas.
For gifted children, the community of inquiry serves a real purpose in becoming a venue for fooling round with ideas, as a place of fun, play and puzzlement. Its fluidity as an ongoing inquiry, its energy from having many participants and its open-endedness could offer the gifted thinker a real opportunity to articulate and refine ideas. The risk in so doing is they could be seen to be dominating discussion. Gifted children do need the convenient and local opportunity it offers to ground their ideas in real society and to find ready acceptance or face informed qualification without too much loss of face.
The community of inquiry offers gifted children a real social situation in which to test a new social persona. For some few, to take part in it requires reserves of bravery and trust that they may not have so far drawn upon. For a socially well adjusted gifted child, one at ease with both adults and peers, trusting in him- or herself and trusting other children, and secure in his own emotional position and social construction of reality, the community of inquiry offers a local venue to enter into "real" discussions with peers. For this advantage, the community of inquiry offers an optimal educational process.
Gifted children have rich imaginative lives and they develop understandings of themselves and the world that are self sustaining but sometimes faulty. Participating freely and fully in the community of inquiry would be a real opportunity for gifted children to test their own assumptions, self constructed beliefs and hypotheses quickly and relatively painlessly before they become permanent mental constructs with their own faulty justifications. Gifted children typically nurture abiding personal interests, and participating in the community of inquiry offers the chance to share these enthusiasms.
In a difficult social tension with an uncaring teacher, a classroom community of inquiry may offer a safer venue for gifted children to interact with peers. If a teacher is ignorant of the gifted children's own special needs or is indifferent or even antagonistic to their situations, the weekly community of inquiry in the mainstream classroom could offer safer situations at least at arm's length from misunderstanding or criticism. Its inclusivity itself could emerge a possible topic for inquiry. We must remember however that the community of inquiry is not a therapy group nor a mini-clinic nor a diagnostic tool either for identifying and sorting out deep seated social and emotional problems. But as far as it goes, the community should offer gifted children a range of more diversified responses to their questions and comments.
The community of inquiry approach offers many social and educational possibilities for gifted children. But to be satisfying to them, philosophy in the classroom must be about more than learning to be socially skilled or practising desirable thinking skills; it must at least be a tentative consideration of the big issues, truth, goodness and beauty. To be advantageous to the gifted child, our communities of inquiry must be interesting, and touch on the bigger issues; they must be stimulating with advanced content.
MAINSTREAM COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY
It is appropriate here to change the focus from the student to the teacher, and consider newer approaches to understanding the teacher's role in the mainstream classroom when dealing with the gifted child. Beverly Parke (1989:13) has described the teacher's role as being critical for the child's self esteem and welfare:
It becomes important for teachers to learn how to handle the wide range of abilities found in the average classroom in such a way that all students flourish. The gifted and talented students need guidance and direction as well as skill development. Independent studies and tutoring students of lesser ability will not sufficiently compensate for academic requirements that are below students' achievement levels. . . . The gifted require teachers who value student abilities and encourage excellence and achievement. They need instructional leaders who will understand the costs as well as the benefits of being exceptional. . . . The teacher is in a unique position to be of assistance as these students work through the difficult issues they face.
Clearly the teacher is a significant source of self esteem. Would that always continue into community of inquiry?
Joyce Van Tassel Baska is a world authority on gifted education. In Planning Effective Curriculum for Gifted Learners (1993), she also touches on this central role of the teacher when teaching gifted children, indicating however that she should not remain the only source of guidance and information:
Traditional good classroom instruction and the thinking/reflection activities typically suit gifted [children]. Gifted need real life problem solving activities. In these, the role of the teacher changes from being one who models thinking (demonstrates metacognitive reflection, skills and procedures), to being one who coaches (helps, monitors, directs and challenges), to being one who then scaffolds (sets frameworks, modulates, reflects and organises), and finally being one who fades (becomes a member of the group, becomes an occasional resource for information and procedure). This diminishing role of the tutor reflects the learner's increasingly taking control of this own learning, his/her increasing autonomy as a learner.
In other words, the teacher, while having a central role to begin, can reduce her presence so that the children take on responsibility for their learning. This handing over of responsibility for progress in learning is very much a feature of doing philosophy with children with its distinctive student-driven agenda. This directionality towards allowing autonomy of gifted learners is a significant best practice advantageous to them. A dilemma however is how does one implement it when conducting a mainstream community of inquiry when not everyone has this capacity or expectation for autonomy.
CATERING FOR ONLY SOME LEARNING STYLES
When teaching gifted children, it is necessary to start with the individual and to consider the gifted child's different methods of learning. In learning style theory, we accept that different subjects have their different paradigms, different methodologies, even different ways of thinking. In learning styles we speak of the numeric, the literary, the pictorial, the sequential, the phenomenological, the tactile, the psychomotor, the intrapersonal and the sensual modes. In short, we accept that each of us thinks and learns in different ways, and accept different thinking and learning 'styles' as a fact of life. If we consider the best starting point as the learner in himself, the learner as an individual with a history of learning and perceiving and surviving, we will logically provide a learning environment that suits him or her best.
Yet the current fashion of cooperative learning can exploit gifted children. In one cooperative learning strategy, talented children are to be placed as catalysts in different cooperative groups in the classroom. But they could quite readily feel exploited as mini-teachers, and be made leaders where they may well not wish to be. Such 'cooperative learning' does not ordinarily favour developing gifted and talented children (Robinson, 1990:19) since "high ability students in the cooperative and individualistic conditions appear to be hindered by ceiling effects." Clearly practitioners need to distinguish this cooperative learning approach from the community of inquiry approach, otherwise ideological carry-overs will lead to inferior practice within it too. Unfortunately, vectors of gifted achievement and satisfaction do not align with such lowest common denominator cooperation.
DOES COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY SUIT GIFTED CHILDREN?
Consider the situation of the gifted child in the mainstream: learning takes place at a slower pace than he or she can process information; discussions proceed at a snail's pace while interruptions, misunderstandings or cul de sacs are sorted out, and steps are repeated many times so everyone will learn. With such a flood of snail talk and progress at a snail's pace, it's no wonder talented children typically switch off. Who would not? Every teacher has seen it.
The social setting of the community of inquiry may not suit everyone either. Preferred learning styles may not favour it. Clearly some extensive learning is done individually; it may be likely that Maths and Science students prefer such individual learning methods. In a study of preschool children learning Logo on the computer, Ellerton and Bigum (1987:26) report that their trainee student teachers found "that children preferred to work on their own ideas rather than 'learn' what they wanted to 'teach' them." Mary, one such student teacher working with the children, felt her intervention was very unfortunate as the children "could have produced a satisfying procedure and picture (on the computer screen if) left to their own devices" (p. 27). In short, personal discovery learning was these children's preferred mode of learning. Older successful science students seem to prefer this learning style too.
Indeed it is advocated that autonomous learning is the most highly desirable way to proceed with gifted children (Betts, 1988). Contracts, learning centres and long term studies are suggested as methods for catering for gifted children in mainstream classrooms (Van Tassel-Baska & Campbell, 1988). These provisions allow them to work at their own pace and to pursue interesting tangents that more structured learning would not open up.
The community of inquiry may be unable to make adjustments to ensure the gifted child is successful and satisfied in it. He or she may be more or less adaptable as individuals, and indeed the mainstream classroom community may not always offer the most stimulating environment for his or her learning. Lipman seems to recognise this limitation. In one introduction, he says that "people do their best thinking when they are stirred by ideas." He believes that thinking about thinking is worthwhile, that it can be generated and productive. But what seems to be at issue is whether the big ideas are often enough addressed and whether mutual respect is so well established that the gifteds' self esteem is indeed enhanced. Pertinently, he writes that too often the "poetic impulses conflict with the social demands" of secondary schooling.
Some worthy assumptions of Philosophy for Children are that verbal interactions yield useful insights and progress in an inquiry, and that differing points of view and a meeting of experiences generates philosophical discussions. Furthermore:
Philosophy for Children allows the child to discover that thought is satisfying. It aims to extend rudimentary thinking; it is not logic for children. P4C raises self confidence, invites inferential reading of a text, improves analysis and reading, and uses the child's own feelings and concerns by actually making them the agenda of the program. P4C creates an environment to discuss significant problems. With its distinctive Community of Inquiry format, it encourages serious dialogue in an atmosphere of openness and reason and everywhere enhances reflective habits in the individual. (Sternberg, 1984)
To the teacher of the gifted, these claims make the community of inquiry sound like an enviable educational provision. But in fact do these outcomes happen in the mainstream classroom 'community'? Does it in fact lead to inferential reading of texts, discussion of significant problems and encourage serious dialogue? Perhaps, some would argue, the many political, social and cultural lessons it teachers outweigh the central place of high level content, processes and product a gifted education espouses.
To test claims, I forward the ten Aims for gifted education as outlined by Tannenbaum (1983) as criteria for our management and performance. If the mainstream community of inquiry meets these criteria, we can accept that philosophy with children eminently suits gifted and talented children. If not, we teachers need to make appropriate procedural changes in its conduct to ensure it does. The table attempts to rate the classroom community of inquiry experience against them.
Measured against Tannenbaum's (1983:443) ten Aims for evaluating enrichment for the gifted.
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CONCLUSION
To conclude, gifted children have a natural right to pursue excellence. True democracy means allowing the tall poppies to be grow, i.e., recognising we are all brothers and sisters under the bell curve. Our classroom communities must enable growth to happen; we cannot singularly espouse an educational program, however good and admirable, that is at odds with the best interests of its participants, especially if we consider some participants are gifted and talented. It may well be that the mainstream community of inquiry will offer identified gifted many new insights and worthwhile experiences, but over time lack sufficient stimuluses and a pace of learning that he or she is capable of. Other organisational arrangements outlined earlier may be needed to supplement it in his or her overall programming.
REFERENCES