A Critical Historical and Ethnographic Exploration of Eugenics in Gifted Education

• In Event: The Racial Construction of Giftedness

Abstract

With its roots in the American Eugenics Movement, gifted education has an unaccounted for past that continues to recursively shape the present and recreate inequities decade after decade. Gifted education continues to function in hegemonic, racist and oppressive ways partially because of the obscurity of this history and a failure to articulate not only the origins of the field, but the tacit and explicit ways that this history and the original ideology of eugenics continues to reify in the present. In this study, I leverage methods from critical history (Kleinberg et al., 2018) and critical ethnography (Madison, 2020) to produce a dialogical relationship between the present and the past to examine the legacy of eugenics in gifted education.

Author

• Margaret Smith-Peterson, University of Minnesota