Margaret Beale Spencer

I earned my PhD from the Committee on Human Development (currently the Department of Comparative Human Development) in the Child and Developmental Psychology Program. Before returning to Chicago, I 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. At UPenn, I was Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Achievement Neighborhoods Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES) and also guided as its inaugural director, the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute. Both appointments continue to frame my developmental scholarship and application of phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST). It is a systems theory and, most important, is inclusive of all human experience and provides an identity-focused cultural ecological perspective. I evolved the theory over a decade because non-problematizing perspectives about people of color were generally unavailable.  Accordingly, P-VEST affords an authentic representation of human development processes both for Whites and People of Color as lives evolve in an ethnically, racially and economically diverse world. The conceptual framework addresses resiliency, identity, and competence formation processes for diverse humans—particularly youth—both in the United States and abroad.