ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a research, which is drawn from a doctoral thesis, which uses a narrative approach to explore perceptions of academic giftedness and wider educational values in families where a child has been labelled as gifted and talented at school. The thesis was conceived of primarily as a way of countering the normative assumptions of the preponderance of psychological studies of giftedness. Research into giftedness is a highly contested field burdened by a difficult historical legacy. The chapter discusses the findings in relation to the themes of contradiction, continuity, and resistance in two main areas of evidence; giftedness, and class and social mobility, and discusses the three families, the Booths, the Newlands, and the Desmonds, had children aged 16 and 17 who were members of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) at the time of the interviews. The concept of ability was left largely unquestioned, families accepting that being gifted was something one was born with.
