Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer’s scholarship is fueled by a responsibility to make her research on human development inclusive for youth of color. In doing so, she has resisted the traditional, stereotypical notions about the development of diverse children throughout her decades-long career.
“Pretty much starting from the 1940s, anyone who was not White and male was sort of researched – and research questions posed about them really had to do with assumptions of pathology, problems and deviance but never relative to a normal human development under interesting conditions,” says Spencer. “That’s become my passion.”
Spencer, the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, found an interest in psychology during her undergraduate studies in pharmacy at Temple University. Under the prompting of an instructor, she pursued graduate studies in psychology at the University of Kansas and later earned a Ph.D. in child and developmental psychology from the University of Chicago.
That Spencer had three children – her own “little lab group of three” – during her graduate studies underscored the real-world impact of her work and the critical need to include research on multi-ethnic development of youth in textbooks and articles written for psychologists, scholars and others who influence or examine youth development.
“I was always appalled that [my children’s] development was not included in textbooks,” Spencer says, adding that what psychologists called science at the time “was not really science” but, instead, a “sort of organized impressions about difference.”
Spencer’s exposure to the “original ecological psychologists” such as developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner while at the University of Kansas and the interdisciplinary nature of her doctoral program at Chicago served as an underpinning to her training and research that takes into account adolescents’ development in their social, historical, cultural and physical contexts.
“One thing leads to the next set of questions, and you’re always questioning the undergirding philosophical points of view relative to the theories that are out there, and then you’re testing empirically questions that have to do with those assumptions about development,” Spencer says.
