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11:57am May 6, 2014

neurodiversitysci:

Mosaic of Minds: What the gifted education field needs to learn about learning disabilities

Here’s why almost everything you’ll ever hear people in the gifted community say about learning disabilities, twice exceptionality, and misdiagnosis is wrong.

“Researchers in gifted education writing about twice exceptionality continually complain that clinicians who evaluate children lack experience with giftedness; unfortunately, they seem less concerned about their own knowledge of learning disabilities.”

Myths targeted include:

1) Gifted kids experience problems only in certain settings, such as a boring classroom, while learning disabled kids have problems everywhere.

2) When the same behavior occurs in gifted people and people with disabilities, it must occur for different reasons.

“researchers who think we can draw a clean distinction between learning disabilities and giftedness based on motivation often misunderstand the motivations of disabled people due to an external perspective.  I think we would be better off pointing to differences in observable behavior.”

3) One can and should identify twice exceptional students based on “scatter,” or huge gaps between IQ subtests.

Know anyone in the gifted community who just doesn’t “get it” about disabilities? Please share.

What myths irritate you the most?

The myth that IQ is meaningful.

The myth that “giftedness” is a thing, that you will always have, if you ever had a high IQ.

The myth that my “real IQ” isn’t 85, that there’s something called a “real IQ”, that is mysteriously inside you, just waiting to be discovered, separate and distinct from your actual test scores.  And that because I’m “smart”, then I can’t have an 85 IQ.  Or that because my IQ used to be high, then I can’t now have an 85 IQ.  (Or whatever it is now, which may or may not be higher or lower than 85, because honestly you don’t know what it is until you test it and I haven’t been tested in 11 years.)

The myth that IQ is a stable thing throughout your life, or should be.

Lots of the myths around IQ are really the things that bug me.

Also the myth that your cognitive disability (learning disability, autism, whatever else) can’t be that severe if your IQ was ever high.

The myth that high-IQ autistic people have no significant problems functioning in areas unrelated to test scores.  And for that matter that we have no significant problems functioning in areas that seem superficially related to test scores.

The myth that if you’re placed into a gifted program, then you’ll be with people “like you” and you’ll belong finally and everything will fall into place and you’ll be happy and included.

The myth that students in gifted programs need more educational enrichment than other students, and that gifted kids are the only ones who get bored in school.

The myth that if you’re struggling in school and you’re labeled gifted, it must be boredom.  (This one bit me in the ass so hard I’m still angry about it to this day.  I actually learned to say “I’m bored” because it’s the only thing anyone taught me to say.  I needed to say “I’m drowning, I can’t handle school anymore, it’s too hard for me,” but nobody ever ever ever let me say school was hard, because I was “gifted” and school can’t be hard when you’re “gifted”.)

The idea that you can even identify this population called gifted people and separate it out and that this is a good thing.

The idea that people with intellectual disabilities aren’t intelligent.

The idea – held by many gifted people – that it’s impossible for a gifted person to have an intelligent conversation with a person of average or low IQ.  (And that therefore if they’re having an intelligent conversation with you, then your “real IQ” can’t be as low as it actually is.)

That thing people do where they attribute any skills to giftedness rather than hard work.

I could go on for ages, I think there are fundamental assumptions built into the entire concept of giftedness that are broken at the core and can’t be repaired.  This is not to say that some people don’t have talents other people don’t have, but the idea of giftedness is not how to approach them.

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