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Old, new, borrowed, blue: reconceptualizing the systems framework

It is a privilege to be asked to respond to Professor Ziegler and Professor Phillipson’s “systemic theory of gifted education”. It is a testament to our field that it continues to evolve and make use of existing concepts and frameworks to transform educational practices and energize the field through highlighting paradigm shifts in the field. It also forces academics to reflect on the relevance of current theoretical models and its applicability to talent development both in the classroom and home environments. Ziegler and Phillipson began the target article by citing the mechanistic tradition of finding meaning in the natural world and applying this to various processes of identifying giftedness (Ziegler & Stoeger, 2008) – and demonstrating its ineffectiveness in traditional gifted education. The systems theory is said to allow for a greater understanding of the contextual organization of the components as well as their dynamic interactions – with a special emphasis on six central concepts: equifinality, context dependence, interdependence, interconnectedness, levels of system, and phase transition. I appreciated how the authors have likewise cited specific illustrations to elucidate these said concepts further. It is intriguing to note that while the article traced back the historical roots of the earlier mechanistic tradition of gifted education paradigms to Cartesian duality and Galileo’s emphasis on empiricism and scientific measurement and quantification of variables – other equally influential developmental theories that adopt a more “systems” perspective have not been mentioned. A case in point would be Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 2004) bioecological perspectives on human development which postulates the necessity of a complex interaction between the child and the symbols, persons, objects in its immediate environment – making up the chronosystem, mesosystem, exosystem and the larger macrosystem. While Ziegler and Phillipson also cited from Csikszentmihalyi’s research on talented teenagers (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1993) as well as creative and eminent individuals (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) – they did not make mention of the systems perspective on creativity and talent (Csikszentmihayi, 1999) which considers the role played by the domain defined as the shared symbolic knowledge