Creative Performances and Gifted Education: Studies from Art Education.

Abstract

This paper acknowledges that there is widespread support in Gifted Education for students' creative aptitudes to be identified as a domain that includes imagination, originality, fluency, and problem solving. I explore where and when these concepts originated and briefly identify how they are represented in Gifted Education. Then various exogenetic factors are considered that contribute to students' realising creative ends, which are often overlooked in educational literature. Drawing on an art education historical archive and my ethnographic research in visual arts education, I show how practice, field dependence, and reciprocity in the reality of social relations in creative classrooms between teachers and students figure more prominently than might be thought. The paper is intended to open up further discussion about some commonly held assumptions of natural creative ability.