Personal Review of Ecological, Transactional, Systems, and Biopsychosocial-Cultural Theories

For this assignment, you will write a 6-7-page paper (excluding title and references pages). Your paper should be double-spaced and written in APA style and format. The paper will examine your personal development across your lifespan.

The purpose of this assignment is to:

• sharpen your insight, self-reflection and self-awareness;
• integrate and apply relevant theories that will help you understand how your personal developmental history has shaped who you are now;
• use the frameworks discussed throughout this course: developmental, neurophysiological, ecological, systems, cultural, and transactional.

Your Tasks:

First, construct an ecomap that examines your personal ecological niche. Consider your cultural identity and various systems to which you currently belong. This ecomap must be submitted with your paper.

Then address the following elements within your paper:

• Describe the ecological, systems, and cultural contexts in which you live expounding on strengths and resilience drawn from your culture (culture may be ethnicity, race, family, geographic, gender, etc). Apply appropriate theories that we have reviewed that help build an understanding of your social context and how that context has affected you.
• Identify and analyze your development related to multiple identities (student, employee, spouse, parent, etc), important family members, and other relationships; discuss your strengths and struggles; and examine your current developmental stage (what are the current developmental tasks you are negotiating). Apply appropriate theories.
• Review your early years, youth, adolescence, young adulthood. Examine any environmental influence that have shaped who you are. You may need to interview other family members, if available, to review your early development. If this information is not available, reflect on the potential impact.
• Describe and analyze physical, cognitive, moral, social (family, intimates, and peers), emotional/affective, and spiritual domains applying appropriate theories.
• Examine the multiple systems that surround you (as reflected in your ecomap). Identify your relationship with these systems.
• Describe the social context within which you reside. What are the community norms, values, and systems that affect who you are (ie political systems, neighborhoods, family, school, etc).

• Write a paragraph or two at the end of your paper reflecting on your own experience of applying developmental theories to your own life and situation. What have you learned from the analysis that will inform your future work in the profession?
• Integrate a minimum of 6 peer reviewed journal articles into the paper.
• The paper must be in correct APA style and be free of grammar and spelling errors.

NOTE:

This assignment may identify some unresolved issues that require additional work to resolve. This is ok and not uncommon in a program that requires the development of insight and understanding of one’s own background and how those affect current functioning and future professional practice. The instructor may advise the student to seek professional help. However, it is the student’s responsibility to follow through with any needs the instructor, or the student, identifies.