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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The present work is focused on the presentation of some results of a project developed about the
social representations of children on animal welfare and animal rights (e.g., cultural demonstrations
with animals, exhibition of animals in captivity, production and consumption of products of animal
origin, treatment of pets and farm animals). They are preliminary results within the scope of a broader
project "ANIMALIS - Animal welfare in pre-service kindergarten and primary school teachers'
education. Using the Sociology of Childhood, Childhood Pedagogy, Environmental Education and
Human-animal Studies, the present work aims to analyse children´s discourses associated with
factors which can limit animal welfare and their rights and also to identify possibilities of educational
intervention compatible with the inclusion of animals and their rights in pedagogical practices. These
discourses started from the analysis and discussion of situations involving different animal uses
present in the book of Patrick George “Animal Rescue” published by 2015. The methodological
approach is based on a qualitative matrix with the adoption of data collection and analysis
methodologies congruent with the object under study and with the epistemological assumptions of the
sociological research with children: ethnographic observation, image collection, analysis of drawings,
documentary analysis and focused discussion groups (book as an inducer of the discussion). The
selection obeyed the criteria of identification of specificity, interest and feasibility of the research. The
participants were four groups of children, between 2 and 5 years old, from three Kindergarten rooms
(25 children each room) and one nursery room (12 children) of a private socio-educational
organization in the city of Lisbon. The situations designed around animals, promoted by four educators
with extensive professional experience, allowed to identify certain practices developed with animals (i)
as problematic for children (e.g. abandonment and neglect of animals, sale of animals in stores, use of
animal fur to make clothing and footwear) and (ii) as necessary (e.g., the need to invest more in
promoting animal and nature rights, to reflect on the role of pets in their lives, and to develop projects
to learn more about particular animals or situations involving them). The conflict between individual
and group visions is a theme to be highlighted from the analysis of data as well as the fact that
children in the nursery room reveal more blurred boundaries between the human and non-human
worlds.
Description
Keywords
Children Animal welfare Animal’s rights Early childhood education IPL/2018/ANIMALIS_ESELx
Citation
C. Tomás, M. Botelho, A. Almeida (2019) Animal welfare: children’s plural discourses in contexts of early childhood education, ICERI2019 Proceedings, pp. 2574-2580.