The College of Education would like to invite you to attend its 4th Annual Research Symposium. Dr. Sevan Terzian will deliver the keynote address and he will be speaking on “Uncovering the Racial Roots of Gifted Education in the United States” at the COE Research Symposium on Thursday, March 21st from 9:30-10:30am at the J. Wayne Reitz Union, Chamber Room.
African American students have long been underrepresented in gifted and talented programs in American schools. At the start of widespread intelligence testing a century ago, most of the nation’s leading educational psychologists claimed that inherent cognitive deficiencies disproportionately limited the number of gifted African American youth. This address explores how an African American graduate student, Lillian Steele Proctor, challenged such assertions by conducting the first known study of gifted students of color: 30 Black elementary school children in Washington, D.C. during the late 1920s. Most notably, Proctor vividly described these children’s exceptional abilities and demonstrated that gifted African American children exited in healthy numbers. At the same time, Proctor exposed systemic patterns of racial discrimination throughout the nation’s capital that treated all gifted Black youth as second-class citizens and thwarted their intellectual growth. In light of persistent patterns of racial inequalities in American gifted education, Proctor’s pioneering research exposes the deep roots of discrimination and some African Americans’ active resistance against claims of intellectual inferiority.
This event is open to all!
For more information, please see the attached flyer and the Facebook event page here.
