Two of my interests – gifted education and children’s/young adult fiction – intersect at this slightly peculiar space. How are gifted kids/teens represented in fiction titles for that age group?
Some assumptions I’m making that underpin the purpose of this blog:
- Gifted and talented students are a part of all student groups, and can be identified by testing and/or observation. They learn differently (faster and/or deeper and/or weirder) than ‘average’ students. They may also be twice exceptional (i.e. gifted with a learning difficulty). GT students are male and female, coming from all classes and ethnic backgrounds, but identification may be more difficult for some of these groups than others.
- Books for children and young adults are important. Fiction is important. Fiction is not necessarily read as absolutely ‘true’ or as mapping precisely onto the real world, but representation of real-life issues and conditions and types of people in books does have some impact on readers. It matters.
Some preliminary thoughts:
- Authors for young people may subscribe to the ‘all children are gifted’ school of thought. (As Madeleine L’Engle’s Meg Murry might observe, Like and equal are not the same thing at all!) Do books for young people support the idea that the central character must have something that he/she is exceptionally talented at – that there can be no such thing as a ‘gifted’ individual as educationalists understand the term in children’s/YA fiction?
- Characters in books for young readers may be smarter/more insightful than average, as it works well for the story, particularly in YA – but are they acknowledged as ‘gifted’ within the world of the story?
- Characters in books that are labelled as ‘gifted’ are likely to be the ones falling into the ‘child prodigy’ category – i.e. exceptionally gifted – suggesting that either one is ‘average’ or a ‘child genius’ with no level of giftedness in between. (I’m thinking of Millicent Min in Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee, Janine Kishi in The Babysitters Club series by Ann M Martin, Colin Singleton in An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, etc.)
What I’m hoping this blog will consist of:
- Contributions from writers, teachers, librarians, readers, parents, students etc – if you’re interested in participating, please comment, email me, or find me on twitter.
- Posts about single books. Posts about many books. Posts about general tendencies in fiction. Posts about film/TV representations, too, if anyone’s interested. Posts about GT students responding to certain texts/representations (whether from a student perspective, a parent perspective or a teacher perspective). Posts about writing about GT characters. And probably lots more.
This is just a starting point – let’s see what happens!
Cheetah Books 