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The Blind Side

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The Blind Side
Introduction
The movie The Blind Side is about a homeless, male, African-American teenager Michael Oher (Big Mike) who is taken in by the Tuohy family. Michael grew up never knowing who his father was and his mother wasn’t anything but a drug addict who he was taken away from when he was a child. Michael had very little education but had preformed strong in “protective instincts” which is later on used to help motivate his football skills and eventually shape his football career. The Tuohy’s provided Michael not only with a home and a kind loving family, but as well as a tutor to help him get the grades he needed to become eligible for the NCAA Divisions I athletic scholarship (Hancock, 2009).
Bronfenbrenner’s study on the Ecological Theory says that the microsystem is interpersonal relationships that are experienced by the person in a person-to-person setting where they interact with the individual on a daily basis (Bronfenbrenner, U., 1997, p. 39). In this movie the 2 main contexts that help shape Michael’s development through the rest of his adolescents is his adoptive family and his teachers and coach at school. These two contexts mix into the category, which Bronfenbrenner considered the mesosystem as they in relation to Michael, shape the other as Michaels education improved greatly due to the support form his adoptive family.
In Kathryn Wentzel’s study she measured the levels which students motivation was involved with the teachers dimensions (Wentzel, K., 2002, p. 290). In relation to The Blind Side, Michael’s teacher Mrs. Smith was the only one who first felt the need that she could help Michael understand the material and excel better in school. She was the teacher who had gotten the majority of the teachers on board with the way she found that Michael was best able to comprehend the material learned in class and which method turned out best when testing him on it.

Ecological Theory
The Ecological Theory is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s view on adolescent



References: Closson, L. (2014, October, 21). School, Leisure, and Media (PowerPoint slides). Retrieved from https://smu.blackboard.com/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_group=courses&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Fcontent%2Ffile%3Fcmd%3Dview%26content_id%3D_494296_1%26course_id%3D_14645_1%26framesetWrapped%3Dtrue McMahan, I., & Thompson, S. (2015). Introduction. In Adolescence (Canadian ed.). Canada: Pearson. Wentzel, K. R. (2002). Are effective teachers like good parents? Teaching styles and student adjustment in early adolescence. Child Development, 73(1), 287-301. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00406 Bronfenbrenner, U. (1997). Ecological models of human development. Readings on the development of children, 5.

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