Rooted giftedness

Balanced research and practice

In this multimodal, performative talk, we will meet an existentially estranged, gifted young adult. We are going to discover through storytelling that this person will be invited by his mentor to start a dialogue with four representatives of nature. They will invite the young adult (and the listeners) to understand their values, their interconnectedness and our relationship to their well-being. Through this reciprocal, empathic understanding we will reexamine what the future of gifted education and guidance may look like. Who can gifted individuals be in our vivid, yet also very vulnerable, disintegrating ecosystem? We will become aware of the unknown qualities the future entails, the qualitative adaptability and transformational giftedness (Sternberg) it demands and how human agency will have to be understood from an entirely different perspective.