A cultural perspective on talent focuses on how talents develop and are situated in broader sociocultural contexts that encourage specific talents. The term gifted is often used synonymously with the term talented, but to be consistent with the theme of this chapter we use the term talented to avoid evoking connotations of the term gifted. We wish to avoid connotations deriving from the psychometric tradition that equate giftedness with high I& (Feldman, 1982) and assume that it reflects a stable, traitlike characteristic that can be measured and used to predict performance in other situations. Talent implies more domain-specific skills and allows for the possibility of a variety of talents (see Tannenbaum, 1983, for discussion of uses of the terms gifted and talented). In this chapter we take the perspective that individual talents develop in domains of practice encouraged by sociocultural contexts varying in what skills are valued and hence fostered and honored. We stress the relationship that exists between the development of specific talents and the sociocultural experience of the individual, and we argue that the assumption of contextfree generality in skills is misleading.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.