Gifts, Talents and Education

Book excerpt: Gifts, Talents and Education: A Living Theory Approach is a practical guide for teachers on how to help all their pupils to enhance their gifts and talents in the classroom. Examples reveal how teachers can transform the way education is understood in schools, by relating stories of how they learned about their own gifts and talents. The book explains recent key developments in multimedia representations of social and emotional aspects of learning. These permit the multi-sensory gifts and talents of individual learners to be recognised and developed within a process that enhances the emotionally literate space of enquiring classrooms. Gifts, Talents and Education assumes a capability approach to human development which rests on enabling individuals to realise their gifts and talents within a co-created sense of the common good. The book offers values, skills and understanding as concepts that retain a direct connection with practice. The stories are grounded in the lives of practitioner researchers who show the lived meanings of these ideas as they are realised in practice, asking questions such as ‘how do I improve what I am doing?’ and ‘how do I live my values more fully in practice?’.