Using Biography to Counsel Gifted Young Women

Abstract

Gifted young women face a variety of important social and emotional issues throughout adolescence and passage into adulthood.This article presents a number of issues through four themes: gender role expectations, relationship-oriented problems, achievement and underachievement concerns, and the need for resilience in women's lives. The authors propose guided reading of biographies as a counseling strategy through which middle and high school educators may assist gifted females in gaining helpful insights to deal with the problems they face. The article also provides available biographies of gifted females, as well as various ways secondary teachers and counselors might use such an approach to counsel gifted young women.. . . thinking that I had been given a second chance in life, I threw myself into books. I read books about troubled women, Helen Keller and Anne Frank. I read about Eleanor Roosevelt.What a difference it makes in your world to go into some other life. It's what I love most. I'm reading always to leave myself, always to leave myself behind. That's what reading is. You get to leave. Bethany "Ican't believe you're really going to follow through on this one. You must be out of your mind! How many girls in our senior class are seriously going to enjoy AP physics?" It was only the second day of fall semester, and already Bethany found herself needing patience with Jennifer. Bethany listened to her best friend carry on as they dug through their lockers in search of their textbooks for sixth period class. While Jennifer was pleased to be taking psychology, Bethany looked forward to a year of studying physics with Mrs. Harris, the science teacher with the most rigorous standards and the highest expectations for young women at Carver High School. Jennifer carried on, "I just don't get it. Why waste your time?The guys in that class will have just stepped off the bus from Geek City! You won't find any cute guys there."Bethany smiled sheepishly, knowing that her best friend meant well. Jennifer's view of the world was quite different from hers, but she was still her best friend and had been since third grade. Growing up in the same neighborhood, Bethany transformed from neighborhood tomboy to the leading longdistance runner on the Carver High women's track team, while Jennifer had put aside her ballet slippers to become president of the pep club and captain of the cheerleading squad.As they walked away from their lockers, Jennifer reminded Beth to meet her after class. Beth did enjoy accompanying Jennifer on their mall excursions. As she walked down the corridor to AP physics, she remembered the appointment she'd arranged to see her guidance counselor at 3:00. She had been excited to hear from her counselor that several engineering programs were offering scholarships to young women with her range of SAT scores, and she wanted to find more information about these programs. She realized her career plans were important, and she knew that she should see her counselor, but she was torn. Jennifer's comments about th...

Helping all Students Become Einstein’s using Bibliotherapy when Teaching Mathematics to Prepare Students for a STEM World

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Gifted Male Readers: Current Understandings and Suggestions for Future Research

“…As Lenkowsky (1987) claimed, readers progress through three stages-identification, catharsis, and insight-and experience affective growth as they come to see that they are not alone in their struggles and that others have succeeded in overcoming them. Halsted (2009) found this strategy to be of great help in counseling the social and emotional needs of the gifted, and Hébert (1995) identified several cases in which gifted young men were able to triumph over their challenges through the inspiration and strategies gained from reading relevant biographies. As the research suggests, bibliotherapy holds great promise for gifted students who may struggle with thorny issues of asynchrony, peer relationships, underachievement, identity, perfectionism, or twice-exceptional status.…”

“…A second manner of using literacy as a means with gifted learners derives from the foundational work of scholars such as Lenkowsky (1987), Adderholdt-Elliott and Eller (1989), and Hébert (1995) and consists of using bibliotherapy to address the social and emotional needs of gifted students. Bibliotherapy is a process of guided reading in which a parent or educator connects a troubled youth with an appropriate book, selected because its characters are struggling with the same issue or issues concerning the student.…”

Making a place for bibliotherapy on the shelves of a curriculum materials center: The case for helping pre-service teachers use developmental bibliotherapy in the classroom

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