Providing access for culturally diverse gifted students: from deficit to dynamic thinking

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2003 by Donna Y. Ford, Tarek C. Grantham

The success schools achieve at recruiting and retaining diverse students in gifted education depends heavily on critical self-examination and a willingness to move beyond deficit thinking. First, the school district should examine its philosophy of gifted education and its definition of giftedness. More specifically, its philosophy and definition need to be inclusive. Second, assessment instruments and practices must be equitable--the measures must be valid and reliable for diverse students, and ethnic, cultural, and gender biases in the selection process should be eliminated.

Third, students in gifted programs should closely represent the community's demographics. That is, students of diverse backgrounds should be equitably represented according to criteria such as ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The reasons for the disparities must be evaluated and eliminated. Similarly, there should be evidence of increasing diversity among professionals in the gifted program.

Fourth, the school district should provide opportunities for continuing professional development in gifted and multicultural education. More specifically, faculty members and other school personnel must be encouraged and given opportunities by administrators to participate in workshops, conferences, university courses, and so forth. Likewise, there must be a library for teachers and students that contains up-to-date multicultural resources (e.g., newsletters, journals, books, activities).

Fifth, there should be services that assess and address the affective and psychological needs of minority students (e.g., social and emotional needs, racial identity, environmental and risk factors).

Sixth, schools will need to examine how much families are involved in the formal learning process. Diverse families need to be encouraged to become and remain involved.

Seventh, curriculum and instruction need to be grounded in multiculturalism. The curriculum needs to be pluralistic (i.e., it should reflect diversity relative to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other sociodemographic variables). The curriculum should provide genuine options for all students to understand themselves and diverse cultures. Finally, policies should be in place to support multiculturalism and diversity. Published policies regarding multiculturalism are needed, and school personnel must be held accountable for implementing these policies.

At no time during its history has the field of gifted education been able to boast of having a representative number of minority students in its programs. Solutions have varied, but outcomes have been the same--minority students continue to be underrepresented. Perhaps it is time to look for other explanations and other solutions to this dilemma. Students' pedagogical clocks are ticking. How much longer must diverse students wait to be recruited and retained in gifted programs? How much longer must they wait to have greater access to gifted education programs?

Figure 1. Levels of cultural awareness and competence (Storti, 1998).

              Incompetence

Unconscious   Blissful Ignorance

              You are not aware that cultural differences
              exist between you and another
              person. It does not occur to you that
              you may be making cultural mistakes
              or that you may be misinterpreting
              much of the behavior going on
              around you.

Conscious     Troubling Ignorance

              Your realize that there are cultural differences
              between you and another
              person, but you understand very little
              about these differences. You know
              there's a problem, but don't know the
              magnitude of it. You are worried about
              whether you'll ever figure out these
              differences in others.

              Competence

Unconscious   Spontaneous Sensitivity

              You no longer have to think about what
              you are doing in order to be culturally
              sensitive (in a culture you know well).
              Culturally appropriate behavior comes
              naturally to you, and you trust your
              intuition because it has been reconditioned
              by what you know about crosscultural
              interactions.

Conscious     Deliberate Sensitivity

              You know there are cultural differences
              between people, you know some of the
              differences, and you try to modify your
              own behavior to be sensitive to these
              differences. This does not come naturally,
              but you make a conscious effort to behave
              in culturally sensitive ways. You are in
              the process of replacing old intuitions
              with new ones.