This essay aims to continue a conversation initiated in the 1980s about the contrasting terms "peer" and "tutor." This essay begins with a brief history of the terms, and applies Kenneth Burke's concept of identification to peer tutoring to attempt to explain these contradicting terms. Burke's theory of identification…

Gifts can be individually, dyadically, or collectively chosen and oriented. Society, in its identification of the gifted, has chosen to focus on individual and sometimes dyadic goods. This practice represents a culture of individualism, but it has become solipsistic. We argue that identification instead should focus on those most likely to help to…

Theoretical and practical work in gifted education has been dominated by mechanistic precision in measurements designed to select students for gifted programs and guide them through their development. Too much faith in mechanistic precision can become a form of dogmatism that obscures very important, less-measurable dimensions of human ability.…

Although writers have advocated a shift from the gifted child to a talent development paradigm, changes in methods for identifying and cultivating talent in STEM are needed. We present evidence that using a talent development paradigm supported by differentiation with an organicist rather than a mechanistic perspective was effective in identifying…

The author argues that despite the vast proliferation of scientific research, our understanding of dyslexia is marked by serious weaknesses of conceptualization, definition, and operationalization that are not only unscientific but also result in impoverished practice in schools, social inequity in both understanding and provision for many…

We address defining and identifying students with dyslexia within the context of multi-tier systems of support (MTSS). We review proposed definitions of dyslexia, evidence for proposed definitional attributes, and emphasize the role of response to intervention in identifying students with dyslexia. We identify dyslexia as individuals with specific…

The history of giftedness pertains to historical changes regarding how giftedness is conceptualized and defined, and how it serves the practical purpose of identifying gifted children and providing them an appropriate education. The past century has witnessed debates and controversies about what constitutes this elusive human quality we deem…

In this presentation I trouble the ways that critical scholars of difference turn away from the spectral presence of disability in search of more empowering narratives. The alternative narratives they support recreate limiting theorizations of the human/posthuman that continue to support ableist representations of disability. Refusing this…

Over the past decade, there has been a rapidly declining trend in the prevalence of students with learning disabilities in South Korea. In 2019, only 1.5% of students receiving special education support were identified as having learning disabilities. This column reports on three current issues related to learning disabilities to provide a greater…

Some children experience more difficulty than others becoming literate, often at great emotional, intellectual, social, and economic cost to themselves, but also to those who love and care for them, and for society at large. The causes of those difficulties and what to do about them have been the source of much research and sometimes heated…

The major aim of the current paper is to review and discuss three prevailing approaches to the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) since the middle of the twentieth century: Contrastive Analysis (CA, henceforth), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL). It begins with a general overview of how the CA approach was formulated and developed…

This chapter examines how studies focused on the same topic--disproportionality in special education--can generate vastly different conclusions about its sources and causes. By analyzing existing disagreements in the field, we explore essential questions about what constitutes high-quality and relevant evidence when seeking to understand how,…

This chapter analyzes the various ways social class identity has been measured among undergraduate students. Implications of social class definitions and measurement for student affairs practitioners also are discussed.

This article asks, "what in the broad and excessive definitions of composition and rhetoric keeps us from talking about personality and temperament alongside other issues of identity?" Pulling from scientists, queer theorists, and composition scholars, I explore the lived experiences of introverts and highly-sensitive people, which often…

Debates about indoctrination raise fundamental questions about the ethics of teaching. This paper presents a philosophical analysis of indoctrination, including 1) an account of what indoctrination is and why it is harmful, and 2) a framework for understanding the responsibilities of teachers and other educational actors to avoid its negative…