The scientific debates about giftedness and achievement are currently attracting widespread public attention. This is evident, on the one hand, from the fact that a large part of the scientific rhetoric has in the meantime found its way into everyday language use. On the other hand, it is becoming more and more apparent that research on giftedness and achievement is shaping a broad area of knowledge production beyond the disciplinary boundaries of educational science. The diversity and speed of scientific debates on the promotion of giftedness and achievement caused a rapid circulation of the educational narrative about giftedness and achievement, in Germany recently fostered by the incentive programme “Achievement catches on in schools” (Weigand et al., 2020); Federal Ministry of Education and Research (German title: „Leistung macht Schule“; BMBF).

The relation between the promotion of giftedness and achievement on the one hand and a reflected approach to the diversity of students on the other hand is one of the crucial topics in the discourse (Kaiser & Seitz, 2020). So there are a large number of studies that try to explain the nexus and the educational mechanisms between giftedness, achievement and inclusion. They shed light on different aspects of this mechanisms: firstly on the personal disposition (cf. Dai, 2010; Gallagher, 2015) as well as the influence of social origin (cf. Mazzoli Smith & Campbell, 2016), and secondly on the characteristics of school as an institution as well as on the incorporated teacher actions (cf. Veas, Castejón, O’Reilly & Ziegler, 2018). Both the psychologically inspired and the sociologically inspired educational studies on giftedness and achievement point out that research is related to the supra-situational and supra-individual question of how to deal professionally with the perceived students‘ diversity and differences (cf. Heller, Perleth & Lim, 2005; Renzulli & Reis, 2018). Thus, the relation between giftedness, achievement and diversity can be summarised as a diffuse but essential concept of education. However, an overarching analysis of the discourse is still missing today. Yet it would be important to reflect on the structures within which diversity is talked about. Accordingly, the question arises how the terms ‚diversity‘, ‚giftedness‘ and ‚achievement‘ are connected with each other in the educational discourse and and how knowledge about the promotion of giftedness and achievement is transmitted within these discursive formations. Specifically, this implies the question of how is the discourse formed, what intentions are pursued by the authors, which interpretation-patterns of diversity are produced and what narrative structures are behind the interpretation patterns.

In order to analyze the transmission of knowledge within the educational discourse on giftedness and achievement, we tie in with the sociological discourse analysis (Keller, 2011). This combines the sociology of knowledge according to Berger and Luckmann and the discourse theory according to Foucault to examine the impact of the discursive construction of giftedness, achievement and diversity and their interrelationships in educational science. Discourse in this context is understood as social practice (Keller, 2004). Accordingly, discourses can be understood as symbolic orders that define the orders of the promotion of giftedness and achievement. Thus, it is a matter of exploring the discursive construction of knowledge at the level of educational discourse on giftedness and achievement and its social implications.

Using Keller's sociological analysis of discourse (2013; 2011), we analyze how giftedness, achievement and diversity are dealt with in the educational discourse and the structure of this narrative shapes the transmission of educational knowledge practice. The data corpus is based on key contributions to the scientific discourse on giftedness and achievement of the last decade (2009-2020). This limitation is initially based on the intense debate about the divergent results of the Programme of international Students assessment (PISA) within the various countries during this period. Furthermore the ratifications of the UN CRPD (2006) in the different european countries in the following years (Germany 2009) was deliberately marked as the starting point of the temporal span, as it can be assumed that the associated fundamental change of perspective has set important impulses regarding the thematization of diversity for school pedagogy in general and also for the promotion of giftedness and achievement in specific - and continued until the most recent available data in 2020. Criteria such as the journal's impact factor, citation frequency, expert assessments, and circulation were used to select the key texts. In the course of theoretical sampling, a corpus of 93 reference texts has thus emerged, of which 21 comparable key texts have been analyzed. Data selection for detailed analysis was conducted according to theoretical sampling. Following Keller (2004, 2011; 2013), we assume that the discourse names the topics of diversity, giftedness, and achievement in different ways and connects them to a specific narrative structure. The analysis of narrative structures aims to uncover patterns through which story lines about diversity, giftedness, and achievement are configured (cf. Keller, 2004, pp. 106-110).

By reviewing the data corpus, an overarching narrative formation of the discourse concerning giftedness, achievement, and diversity can be systematized in the following way: First, a problematization of the concepts of giftedness, achievement, and diversity is made by referring to the large-scale assessments and the UN CRPD, respectively. The related school developments are expressed in the polarization of high-performing and low-performing students. They are linked to specific risk constructions of the promotion of giftedness. Based on this, pedagogical interventions are presented and finally summarized in the giftedness-and-achievement-dispositive. Three dispositives could be identified: Elite formation, economic usability, and educational equity. In the context of elite education, responsibility for school achievement is demanded, but in the sense of mobilizing the gift reserves of (highly) gifted and high-achieving students. It is characterized by a mechanistic rhetoric, which is used to justify trainings for the transformation of high talents into high achievement. There is an appeal to institutional responsibility for (highly) gifted and high-achieving students. From a functionalist perspective, the focus is on mobilizing achievement to maximize human capital. From this perspective, the initial focus should be on this elite in order to provide them school-based promotion. Overall, little attention is paid to promoting giftedness in an educational equity way. When attention is paid to this perspective, the aspect of equal opportunities in particular is given high priority. Special attention is paid to different preconditions with regard to the social milieu. By analyzing the narrative structure, we uncover the tensions between institutionalized practices of giftedness and overcoming social inequalities. We also show how differences are produced and hierarchized by the construction of at-risk groups in the discourse of giftedness and achievement. Accordingly, it highlights the exclusionary pressures inherent in stratified school systems in particular, which effectively perpetuate inequality.

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