The Contextual Approach And Vygotsky's Contextual Perspective

As a growing adult, there have been many opportunities and experiences that help influence my growth and development both physically and mentally. Just as a prominent relationship or personal experience have a significant impact on personal development, a cultural event can also be just as significant and include relationships and experiences from a different point of view. In December of 2001, when I was 4 years old, my family moved from Crestview, Florida to Yakota Air Base in Yakota, Japan. The 5 years I spent in Japan notably affected my outlooks on life, my perception of others and myself, and lead me to appreciate the differences throughout other cultures. I attended a DOD or Department of Defense school, which is essentially an American …show more content…
This is a very different yet interesting perspective because the others focus on one factor separately, while the contextual perspective involves all of the factors and how they constantly interact. There are two major theorists and theories that fall under the contextual perspective and those are Bronfenbrenner ' bioecological approach and Vygotsky 's sociocultural theory. Firstly, Bronfenbrenner 's bioecological theory proposes that there are five levels of environment (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem) that influence people. In this perspective, the levels are all intertwined and a change in one system simultaneously changes the other systems. The microsystem is described as the everyday environment of a child 's life such as my schools, my immediate family, cheerleading team, and Girl Scout troop. The mesosystem is the connection between the microsystem such as the student-teacher relationships I developed, my peers in school and my other activities and my relationship with my parents and brother. The exosystem expands on the broader influences and institutions such as my school and the community I lived in. The macrosystem represents more of the larger cultural influences, like value systems and governments. In this system, my macrosystem would be marginally different from my peers now because the customs and standards in Japan are much higher and significantly less individual oriented. The values in Japan such as silence, respect, education and age especially, have followed me throughout my development and now that I am growing mentally and intellectually, I have come to more of a realization of how much that culture had an impact on me. Finally, the chronological system incorporates the passage of time. Secondly, Vygotsky 's sociocultural approach also has an