Abstract
Dr. Laurence J. Coleman—Larry—was a serious academic who contributed significant and unique research to the literature base about students with gifts and talents. As a person, Larry was always evolving. The research questions that plagued him were the fuel that drove him to constantly improve his research capacity. At the same time, his absolute dedication to peace was only transcended by his commitment to his family. These three passions yielded a world-class academic who improved the world through his scholarship, his efforts toward peace, and his role within his family. One cannot separate Larry from these passions and understand his research. He was a walking, talking textbook example of a qualitative researcher. He lived his research and understood the phenomena of what he studied at a very deep level. Larry’s work brought legitimacy of qualitative research to the field of gifted education. He did this both in his writings and in his editing of work with young scholars while he was the editor for the Journal for the Education of the Gifted from 1996 to 2006.
We have created this special issue of JEG to offer a representative sample of the corpus of Larry’s work. To shed light on the nature of both Larry the person and Larry the researcher, eight articles were chosen for republication. Some are from early in his career and others later, and they are included in the order in which they were originally published. Most focus on gifted students themselves, others on a specific teacher of gifted students, and still others on the contexts for gifted students. All brought different ways of thinking to the field. As a student of and collaborator with Larry, I was privy to how he did his writing. His writing style was carefully sparse and unadorned. It revealed his belief that some published research included pretentious language that obscured meaning and made it less accessible; he did not attribute sophistication to this style of writing. Just the opposite, he thought it reflective of William Barrett’s (1979) notion of elevating style over substance as described in his classic book, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization. Larry’s commitment to ensuring that everyone had access to ideas was characteristic of his absolute trust in working people. These reprinted works honor his memory, and I hope they will encourage further research in the direction paved so clearly by Larry Coleman.