Search

Back in the early 1990s, three Manitoba School districts launched the "Lost Prizes" project to reclaim talented, at-risk high-school dropouts. Despite their unique gifts, these relationship-resistant youth were disenchanted, disillusioned, and disconnected. Many had major substance abuse problems and were engaged in serious criminal activity. At the time, in an attempt to focus our efforts and delineate strategies that might be effective with this group, our team of educators developed the Amphitheater Model for Talent Development. It has undergone revision over the years, but its emphasis has always been on equity, flexibility, and guiding practical interventions to identify and nurture the talents of all students, including those who have been hitherto marginalized. In this article, we discuss briefly the original "Lost Prizes" initiative (where Creative Problem Solving and mentoring were used in combination to turn around young lives), summarize more recent follow-up and current programs, and describe the Amphitheater Model itself.

Throughout his focus article, Robert Sternberg discusses the theoretical underpinnings and rationale behind his emerging Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model. In the process, he raises several critically important issues, including the misuse of IQ testing as the major method for identifying gifted students, the need to address real-life problems by focusing on creativity and concerned citizenship, and the potential for principled, ethical leadership to make a real difference in the world now and in the future. The intent of this response article is to pick up on these major themes, extend the conversation, emphasize the necessity for expanding enrichment programming to include marginalized young people for whom the playing field is not level, and help set the stage for wider implementation of the ACCEL framework to enhance identification, instruction, and learning in gifted education.

This article presents the author's comments on Hisham B. Ghassib's "Where Does Creativity Fit into a Productivist Industrial Model of Knowledge Production?" Ghassib's article focuses on the transformation of science from pre-modern times to the present. Ghassib (2010) notes that, unlike in an earlier era when the economy depended on static knowledge reflected in basic trades and apprenticeships, today's reality has positioned science as a knowledge industry that must "persist and reproduce itself" if it and modern societal structures hope to survive. In conceptualizing "the knowledge enterprise" as an industry, Ghassib (2010) identifies and defines its components. Much of what he says connects quite nicely with elements of the more than five-decade-old tradition of the theory and practice of Creative Problem Solving. The author discusses Ghassib's (2010) six components: (1) the productive sites; (2) the producers; (3) raw material; (4) means of knowledge production; (5) methods of production; and (6) peculiarity of the product.

Throughout his focus article, Robert Sternberg discusses the theoretical underpinnings and rationale behind his emerging Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model. In the process, he raises several critically important issues, including the misuse of IQ testing as the major method for identifying gifted students, the need to address real-life problems by focusing on creativity and concerned citizenship, and the potential for principled, ethical leadership to make a real difference in the world now and in the future. The intent of this response article is to pick up on these major themes, extend the conversation, emphasize the necessity for expanding enrichment programming to include marginalized young people for whom the playing field is not level, and help set the stage for wider implementation of the ACCEL framework to enhance identification, instruction, and learning in gifted education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]