A Post-NAGC Guide for New Subscribers
NAGC 2023 is over, and I’m flying home to Colorado today. I will share my post-conference thoughts as soon as I can, but in the meantime, I want to introduce subscribers to podcast episodes with a gifted-specific focus that may interest educators, practitioners, parents, and others who work and live with this population.
For more on the theory of positive disintegration, check out Episode 1: Welcome to Positive Disintegration. I’ve also written a post introducing the theory called What is Positive Disintegration?
You can listen to Episode 2: Overexcitabilities and Pseudoscience for more on overexcitability. Emma and I reviewed the five types of OE in an episode recorded directly following NAGC 2021.
Episode 7: Gifted Minds and Empathy includes insights from Fiona Smith, who has been assessing and working with gifted children in Australia for many years. Fiona brings to life the issue of living with intensities and sensitivities from her perspective of a parent and her own experiences.
Episode 11: Positive Disintegration in Children and Adolescents with Tina Harlow. Tina talked about how overexcitabilities can differ among family members and the importance of understanding and honoring these differences. She also shared strategies for dealing with the different types of overexcitability.
Episode 16: Overexcitabilities and Openness to Experience with Shelagh Gallagher, the current president of NAGC. We discussed the controversy in gifted education about OE and openness to experience and the value both frameworks can provide in informing us about the gifted student experience in education.
Episode 23: Explorations in Gifted Diversity with Jennifer Harvey Sallin from InterGifted. We talked about what giftedness can look like in adults, how it manifests, and the range of diversity within giftedness.
Episode 24: Through the Lens of Youth with Lance Johnson offers a young adult’s perspective on being gifted. Lance shared advice for other young people who resonate with his story, such as finding true peers and meaningful connections and accepting one’s differences.
Episode 25: Experiences Being Profoundly Gifted Part 1 with Nth Bar-Fields and Joi Lin. We talked about what it means to be profoundly gifted (PG), which we defined as the 99.9th percentile of intelligence. Joi and Nth shared their PG journeys and discussed the challenges of this outlier experience.
Episode 27: Through the Neurodivergent Mirror with Tracy Winter. We talked about Tracy’s research on gifted adults “being seen,” where most of her participants fell into two groups: they were not seen as gifted, or they were mis-seen in a way that was not aligned with their self-perceptions.
Episode 30: Celebrating Neurodiversity, Overexcitabilities, and Giftedness with Katy Higgins Lee. We talked about giftedness as a type of neurodivergence in its own right, discussed her well-known Venn diagram representing the overlap of autism, ADHD, and giftedness, and touched on the issue of misdiagnosis.
Episode 31: Gifted Connections with Celi Trépanier. We talked about the importance of friendships, connections, and support within the gifted community.
Episode 32: You Are Not Alone! with Sophia Elliott from the Our Gifted Kids podcast. We covered a wide range of topics in this conversation, from learning about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodiversity, and giftedness to education, policy, and parenting challenges.
Episode 34: Fostering Gifted Growth at Yunasa. Chris has worked at Camp Yunasa five times over four years and discussed experiences working with gifted/2e kids in that setting.
Episode 35: Dąbrowski's Theory in Practice with Patty Gatto-Walden. This episode features a discussion of Patty’s work with the highly and profoundly gifted in clinical practice.
My flight will be boarding soon, so I need to stop here. The best part of attending NAGC’s conference is connecting with friends and colleagues. As usual, spending time with people I know and love while meeting new people was beautiful. I’ll have another post out later this week with more details about my session for those who couldn’t be there, and I will share some of my takeaways from the conference.