Fifteen Years: The Evolution of 2e—Susan Baum

The year was 2003. The idea of twice-exceptionality was just catching on. The seed had been planted during the previous generation by pioneers such as Joanne Whitmore, June Maker, Lynn Fox, Ellen Brody, Mary Ruth Coleman, Elizabeth Nielsen, and Dennis Higgins. Lois Baldwin and I, along with Susan Levy, founded AEGUS (the Association for the Education of Gifted Underachieving Students), dedicated to creating awareness of gifted students whose abilities lay dormant due to undiagnosed learning differences. The advent of the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, which supported model projects and research focusing on twice-exceptional students, helped the seedlings blossom into a budding field.

I had just begun to work on the second edition of my book, co-authored by Steven Owen and John Dixon, To Be Gifted and Learning Disabled: From Identification To Practical Intervention Strategies. It was originally published in 1991, and already there was lots of growth to report. This student population, known earlier as gifted learning-disabled students, now included gifted individuals with attention deficits and those on the autism spectrum. New publications such as Deidre Lovecky’s Different Minds: Gifted Children with AD/HD, Asperger Syndrome and Other Learning Deficits and the book by Jim Webb et al. Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults would appear in the next few years, offering more information about who these students were and how their needs might be misinterpreted.