Critical Analysis Of Akeelah And The Bee

Akeelah and The Bee is centered around the story of an 11-year-old African American girl, Akeelah. Despite being cunning, she attends a school that appears to be have a history of low academic achievement. She is encouraged by her principle to participate in a spelling bee, and later qualifies for the nationals. This movie is a portrayal of Akeelah’s voyage to a national title, with the help of her coach Dr. Larabee, and later on, the help of her family and community (Fishburne & Atchison, 2006). This paper will critically analyze this film using developmental psychology as a lens. I will do this by primarily analyzing the children and adult relationships through the mesosystem and macrosystem level by first looking at the effects of Akeelah’s …show more content…
Akeelah seals herself from the appreciation of her capabilities and her intelligence, largely because of the culture and environment she is in. She limits herself to flourish and excel in their academics because of the limited expectations from her environment. Therefore, Akeelah doesn’t listen or appreciate any advice or help with regards to her gift of spelling. This is seen through the conversations with her English teacher, as Akeelah dismisses any of their incentives or advise which hinders her academic development. However, Dr. Larabee widens Akeelah’s understanding and views of her culture and society. He shows her to a side of her culture she is not used to seeing. He exposes her to scholarly articles by African Americans. This allows her to change her perspective of her limitations and abilities because of the culture and race she was born into. This interaction between Akeelah and Dr. Larabee allows her to start accepting her gifts and capabilities and accepting advice from adults in her community including Dr. Larabee himself and the …show more content…
This is demonstrated in Akeelah and The Bee as the children in Crenshaw middle school are shown be of a low academic ability as they do not consider education an importance. Akeelah however, is distinctive as she has a unique gift for spelling. This illuminates her from the rest of the students which leads to other students bullying her and calling her names such as ‘freak’ and ‘Brainiac’ (Fishburne & Atchison, 2006). Akeelah strains to self-regulate from the bullying by attempting to disregards her gift in endeavor to not be bullied. Experiences and interactions with peers influenced her development with the microsystem of school as she no longer applied and develops herself in order to fit in with the