Socializing Giftedness: Toward an ACCEL-S Approach

In this response, we commend Sternberg's Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model yet urge him to consider an ACCEL-S model that more fully incorporates society's integrative role in giftedness. ACCEL-S builds on the highly complex and contextual view of giftedness proposed by Sternberg and transforms it into a participatory framework. Within it, the skills associated with giftedness shape but are also shaped by social context; they generate meaningful forms of collaboration as well as grow out of them. The concept of giftedness itself is transformed from a person-centric one to a distributed model in which being gifted is a relational instead of purely personal achievement. [This article responds to Robert Sternberg's "ACCEL: A New Model for Identifying the Gifted" (EJ1148989).]