ABSTRACT
Traditionally, intelligence has been thought of as an individual attribute that people carry across contexts. Both our measurements of intelligence (they take place outside of any familiar context of learning, using protocols that make assumptions about the separation of content and context) and the ways we talk about intelligence (someone is “smart” or “gifted,” rather than someone might act smart) indicate our overwhelming belief that intelligence is ultimately a property of an individual. In this chapter, we propose a different vision of intelligence, one that focuses on how we learn to act in ways that are recognized as more or less intelligent, and the role of the environment in making an individual appear intelligent or not. Specifically, we propose a way of thinking about intelligence that highlights the kinds of disposition we develop to act in particular ways, and consider how those dispositions develop in relation to learning opportunities with which learners are presented over time.
