Diverse Paths to Well-being, Resiliency and High-Vulnerability: Interrogating Du Boisian Insights Instrumental to Developmental Science
The Carolina Consortium on Human Development is pleased to welcome
Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer as the next presenter in our Spring 2021 Series on
Culture & Developmental Science: Considering Context, Culture, and Intersectional Approaches! Join us Mondays from 2:00 – 3:15 PM (EST) via zoom (https://fpgcdi.zoom.us/j/91078842280).
On Monday, February 22nd Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer will present
Diverse Paths to Well-being, Resiliency and High-Vulnerability: Interrogating Du Boisian Insights Instrumental to Developmental Science.
Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer is the Charles L. Grey Distinguished Service Professor, Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Life Course Human Development in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. A developmental psychologist and a leading scholar of deve
Filed in Appointments, Faculty on January 1, 2021
Twenty-three University of Chicago faculty members have received named professorships or have been appointed distinguished service professors. Five of these appointments went to Black scholars.
Melissa L. Gilliam has been named the Ellen H. Block Distinguished Service Professor of Health Justice in the departments of obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics. Her clinical focus is in pediatric and adolescent gynecology and family planning. She has served as vice provost at the university since 2016. Dr. Gilliam is a graduate of Yale University, where she majored in English. She earned a master’s degree at the University of Oxford in England and a medical degree at Harvard University. Dr. Gilliam also holds a master of public health degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
color estimate. okay, yeah. reporter: we asked renowned child psychologist and university of chicago researcher dr. margaret beale spencer to design a pilot study for cnn and analyze the results. our children are always near us, you know, because we re a society, and what we put out there, kids report back. and you ask the question, they ll give you the answer. reporter: spencer s team tested more than 130 kids in eight schools with very different racial and economic demographics. half of the schools were in the north, half in the south. oh! nicely done. reporter: the country s much more diverse today than in the 1940s, the children in this project are from two age groups and two races, white and black. to better allow comparison to the original doll study. 4 and 5-year-old children were asked a series of questions about these images. 9 and 10-year-olds were asked questions about the same images
that some people will question this project s conclusions. what stereotypical messages are being sent in a country that elected a black president? like all research projects, ours is not perfect. some kids were told ahead of time they would be told about race, some children identify one race, but came from biracial families, like this boy whose mother is white. but professor spencer tells us these are common answers in research. to be clear this is a scientifically informed and executed pilot study. which suggests the need for further research, the results point to major trends, but are not the definitive word on children and race. still, they underline what dr. spencer sees as an alarming conclusion. we are still living in a society where dark things or devalued and light things are valued. reporter: the question we re left with is where do we go from here? still ahead, we visit with andrew, a 5-year-old whose
more strongly than the african-american children. reporter: that is our third finding. the finding that interested dr. spencer the most. that overall younger and older children keep the same patterns, stereotyping. in other words, their ideas c s change little from age 5 to 10. by the time children are older, there is a natural filter, you know, their own ways of thinking so that it aids them to rethinking the extreme stereo tippic responses to become less highly biased. reporter: that left professor spencer wondering what is causing this pattern. she speculates that kids are bombarded by stereotypical messages and adults in kids lives have to fight to override the deluge. black parents may be more diligent about that, while white parents may not notice the need. the messages are the same for all children, and therefore the task is the same for all parents, parents have to reframe what children experience. reporter: we realize these