I feel confident that 8th graders are the perfect age to take on such a responsibility to connect with CFCs and their interest and painting them on custom shoes for this lesson. In Chip Wood’s Yardsticks, he states, “Though family, church, camps, and other social arenas are important, society for the fourteen year old is primarily school. School is the structured social setting where the external society makes its demands on the adolescent. How the school is structured and how it places demands on its students is of critical importance in the development of healthy young adults four our future society,” (p. 167). By teaching such a lesson in a school setting, students will learn that caring and kindness can eventually become a normal habit and allow them to be respectable and responsible adults.  Having such a lesson given to the students will make them feel important, it will give them a responsibility not just for them to complete a project for this class but they know that this project will be helping CFCs. They will know that every single one of them will have a real child to custom paint a pair of shoes for, they will all know that they have a important job to handle and the whole class must perform to their best potential possible. Lowenfeld (1987), “One of the out standing characteristics of this age is that children discover that they are members of society, a society of peers. It is during this time that children lay the groundwork for the ability to work in groups and to cooperate in adult life,” (p. 306). Playing of Lowenfeld, George (1992), points out, “For a clear definition of any team, its members need to clearly spell out the beliefs, goals, and standards the team represents,” (p. 60), this lesson will be extremely important to the student because of the responsibility this lesson calls for.

 

In Wachowiak, Chapter 11 (2009), Wachowiak mentions how middle school students like their work to have expressive content. Wachowiak states, “ They are interested in finding a powerful means to convey an experience or an idea,” (p. 119). Because of this I believe that this assignment will connect students with others who are less fortunate who deal with an illness with an emphasis of hope and compassions expressed through their customized shoes. Adolescents are at the age where they not only think beyond the present but also analytically reflect about their own thinking (Muuss, p. 160, 1996).

 

Piaget (1980), argues, “Formal operations give the adolescent the ability to understand and even form theories and “to participate in society and the ideologies of adults; this is often accompanied by a desire to change society and even, if necessary, destroy it (in his imagination) in order to elaborate a better one,” (p. 72). By having students at this age level, it based on Piaget theory, eighth graders can successfully demonstrate the ability to gather research to convey an understanding on possibilities of designs that can be impactful and personal to selected CFC’s.