Uncommon Courses is an occasional sequence from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to educating.
Title in fact:
“Canine Learning and Behavior”
What prompted the thought for the course?
When I used to be rising up, my love for animals led me to volunteer at animal shelters. But it wasn’t till I began educating psychology that I discovered one other technique to help the well-being of shelter animals. During my first yr of educating a psychology course about studying, I noticed that the course’s content material might be used to coach shelter dogs.
Since some shelter dogs show problematic behaviors, reminiscent of fearfulness, destructiveness and disobedience, they’re much less more likely to get adopted. I needed my college students to make use of their information, ardour and care to coach shelter dogs and enhance their probabilities of discovering a everlasting home.
What does the course discover?
The course teaches college students how one can apply behavioral evaluation and modification strategies towards the coaching of shelter dogs. Students work with dogs on studying to comply with cues reminiscent of “sit,” “down,” “stay” and “come”; carry out tips reminiscent of “high-five,” and “roll over”; and full agility programs made from tunnels, hoops and weaving poles.
The course additionally explores the emotional, psychological and physiological advantages of the human-animal bond, reminiscent of diminished stress, by integrating the dogs into academic and therapeutic environments. For occasion, the scholars prepare the dogs to sit down by them calmly for your complete length of a lecture. This talent could also be essential for future adopters who work inside an academic setting or want their canine to accompany them into the classroom.
The college students additionally prepare the dogs to go to our scientific academic facility, the Experiential Learning Commons, which was constructed as a mock hospital. Within our simulated emergency room, intensive care room, affected person room, maternity room and examination room, college students prepare the dogs to walk subsequent to simulated sufferers’ wheelchairs, sit by sufferers’ beds and supply them with affectionate and nurturing companionship.
Finally, the course instructs college students on how one can apply for grants for nonprofits, with the thought being to safe funding to help animal shelters.
Why is that this course related now?
This course creates a collaborative and reciprocal partnership between a college and the group wherein it’s situated. Focusing on the look after shelter dogs, it permits for college, college students and a shelter’s employees and volunteers to alternate information and sources. As such, it makes use of an tutorial method often known as community engagement.
What’s a essential lesson from the course?
Working alongside our animal shelter group companions, and underneath the course of my co-instructor, gifted canine coach Megan Mills, college students study that they will make a real and visual impression on society, one canine at a time.
What supplies does the course characteristic?
Michael Domjan’s “The Principles of Learning and Behavior”
Cynthia Ok. Chandler’s “Animal-Assisted Therapy in Counseling”
“Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy,” edited by Aubrey H. Fine
What will the course put together college students to do?
Students will study to make use of psychological studying ideas to work successfully with shelter dogs – and this information can later be translated to different domains of their lives. I consider that by coaching shelter dogs and studying to jot down nonprofit grant proposals, my college students will grow to be moral and accountable residents – each regionally and globally.
