Margaret Beale Spencer is an American psychologist whose work centers on the effects of ethnicity, gender, and race on youth and adolescent development.
[1] Dr. Spencer's career spans more than 30 years and consists of over 115 published articles and chapters, stemming from work funded by over two-dozen foundations and federal agencies.
[2][4] Since 2009, she has served as the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.
[9][10] PVEST addresses the social, historical, and cultural context in which youths develop, and as well as the perceptions and self-appraisals that individuals use to form their identity.
[9] The PVEST Theory breaks identity formation into the following five components:[11] The APA Task Force on Resilience and Strength in Black Children and Adolescents describes Spencer's PVEST theory as "a seminal and important contribution to the study of resilience among African American children and youth" (p. 34) for being one of the only theories taking into account the "ecological contextual circumstances unique to youths of color in the United States" (p. 23)[9] In a 2008 publication titled "What does ‘acting White’ actually mean?," Margaret Beale Spencer and Vinay Harpalani addressed John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham's widely cited "Black students' school success: Coping with the burden of 'acting White,'" which proposed the Acting White hypothesis, the idea that African-American communities devalue academic achievement because success in school is seen as an attribute of White dominant culture.
"[12] 2006: Awarded the Fletcher Fellowship, recognizing work that furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.