Student+Audience

Student Audience The audience for which this study was constructed consists of two groups of students at different grade levels. Both groups are part of a small, rural district located 15 minutes east of Indianapolis, Indiana. This district has three elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. Due to the small number of schools and extremely limited movement of citizens into or away from the community, most students attending the high school have progressed through the district middle school prior to their attendance Half of the student audience for this study is a 7th grade English class. This class would consist of approximately 20-25 students. As their rural middle school can claim little in the way of diversity, all students are Caucasian and come from middle to upper middle class backgrounds. They have limited interaction with other racial or cultural groups and generally base their ideas of other ethnicities and cultures upon what they have experienced in school or within popular culture. Middle school students have the ability to extend themselves cognitively as they are very inquisitive about how the world works and where they fit into it. Curiosity aside, they are at an age when learning critical consideration of information is essential to their continued success in school as well as the outside world. Promoting critical thinking and research activities that attend to this need are supported by the interest of this group in the idea of fairness and equity. As adolescences, many things in life do not seem fair. Investigation of an unjust event in history would be of interest to this student group. The second half of this study’s student audience is a high school sociology class. This class group is constructed of approximately 17-23 sophomore and junior students. They have the same basic socio-economic construct of the middle school class and may even have younger siblings within the group. This group would have transitioned from the middle school where, ideally, they would have participated in the 7th grade engagements on this topic which would have created schema they could refer to when conducting their inquiry from a sociology standpoint. In addition, this older student group is more mature and able to deal with more involved and detailed content of the Holocaust and its surrounding events. Many of them have had social experiences with diverse groups through travel or work engagements. Though their perception of the world is broader and more mature, and they bring more advance technological knowledge with them, they still will benefit from exploring the subtle influences of politics, prejudice, and the impacts they can have on citizens both cooperating and those who are not. Approaching this topic from a sociological stance would be interesting for this group as they are quickly preparing for entry into the adult world where child status will no longer protect them from power and inequity.
 * Student Audience**