Gifted and talented girls today struggle with similar social and emotional challenges as those in the past, but their world looks different. With the changes in the media and communication ecology, they are navigating a highly digitised and mediated social landscape. This article explores gifted teenage girls' lived experiences of Facebook, utilising phenomenological research on the experiences of five female students in high profile leadership roles in their secondary schools. The findings suggest these participants experienced a complex juggling act as they managed the tensions resulting from their in-school micro-celebrity status and online social media presence. Suggestions are offered on how educators and school leaders can act to best support gifted and talented girls in their use of social media.

The field of gifted and talented studies has its origins in the intelligence quotient research of the late 19th and early 20th century. These psychological foundations remain a strong influence even though the field has since expanded to include other paradigms and greater diversity in conceptions of giftedness and talent. Some researchers argue that the field could benefit from greater interdisciplinary engagement, especially in studies of gifted and talented girls, which tend to include a focus on how gifted girls’ external environments influence their emotional worlds. This article proposes that concepts developed by critical sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are useful for expanding and deepening understandings of the internal and external worlds of gifted and talented girls. It offers evidence from a recent qualitative study with academically gifted and talented teenaged girls in New Zealand. The results highlighted the marginalised position of the gifted and talented identity and the privileging of identities that were based on dispositions versus innate ability. The study also identified a hierarchy of valued forms of capital within the teenage girl social landscape and a resulting theorisation of an empowered gifted and talented girl habitus. This article demonstrates how Bourdieu’s work is a constructive addition to the field.

No abstract