Room 8 - Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer

• In Event: Wednesday Afternoon Chat with Leaders

Abstract

Margaret Beale Spencer is the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the department of Comparative Human Development and Professor of Life Course Human Development at the University of Chicago. A developmental psychologist, she is also an alumna of the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. Before returning to Chicago, she was the endowed Board of Overseers Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Development (ISHD) Program and faculty member in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania (Psychology in Education Division). Additionally, she was Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Health Achievement Neighborhood Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES), and also guided as its inaugural director, the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute. Guiding the noted efforts and continuing to frame her scholarship, Spencer's Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (P-VEST) provides an identity-focused cultural ecological perspective which frames her gender, race, culture and context acknowledging program of human development research. Recognizing the universality of human vulnerability, the theory addresses resiliency, identity, and competence formation processes for diverse humans situated both in the United States and abroad.

Author

• Margaret Beale Spencer, University of Chicago
  Leader