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Starting Over: An Iranian Conception of Giftedness and How It Can Transform Societies and the World

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The Palgrave Handbook of Transformational Giftedness for Education

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Abstract

Lewis Terman introduced a concept of giftedness, based on IQ scores, that has permeated, for roughly a century, the US and other conceptions of what it means to be gifted. The result is that educators (and scholars) have tended to emphasize, in their conceptions of giftedness, the abstract-reasoning skills and academic knowledge base measured by the Stanford-Binet test that Terman co-created.

Such conceptions of giftedness fail to address the challenges our country, and many other countries, are facing in the twenty-first century. We investigated culturally embedded conceptions of giftedness as evidenced in one of the most important Iranian literary canons, The Gulistan, and have synthesized it into a model that is quite different from the Western one.

According to the Iranian Hierarchical Wisdom Model, giftedness can be understood by a hierarchical model with three levels: practical intelligence, wisdom, and sagacity. In this paper, we define these levels in terms of the distinction between transactional and various forms of transformational giftedness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One well-known example was Prof. Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, who was the first woman and the first Iranian honored with the Fields Medal (the most prestigious award in mathematics).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Foundations, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA

    Sareh Karami & Mehdi Ghahremani

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  1. Sareh Karami
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  2. Mehdi Ghahremani
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Correspondence to Sareh Karami .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Robert J Sternberg

  2. Department of Graduate Education, Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ, USA

    Don Ambrose

  3. Department of Counseling Educational Psychology and Foundations, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA

    Sareh Karami

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Karami, S., Ghahremani, M. (2022). Starting Over: An Iranian Conception of Giftedness and How It Can Transform Societies and the World. In: Sternberg, R.J., Ambrose, D., Karami, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Transformational Giftedness for Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91618-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91618-3_13

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