OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In the Summer of 1979, teenagers on a ‘Mentally Gifted Programme’ in California wrote to the youth magazine of the National Association for Gifted Children in Britain. They criticised the label ‘gifted’ and its burdens, writing: ‘Think of the position I have been put in since first grade, just because I passed a silly test of describing pictures’.
This paper explores the characterisation of ‘giftedness’ by psychologists in Britain and America; a co-constructed notion which came to denote a small percentage of people, 0.5-2% on various measures, with extreme, unusual, and powerful intellect. The paper explores how this label was applied to children in practice – by national and local IQ testing, for example, and in daily life as parents used magazine tests and brought new recipes and products on this basis. Children, meanwhile, used new voluntary groups to critique this.
