Etica animale nelle scuole e funzionalità dell’approccio costruttivista per la crescita dell’empatia [Animal ethics in schools and functionality of the constructivist approach for the growth of empathy]

Abstract

Description: The paper evolves from the consideration on the necessity of sensitizing students to a very actual topic such as animal Ethics and of stimulating empathy towards all the species of the planet. The pivotal question of the study is the following: how can a teacher increase empathy and raise awareness of this theme in students during his or her lessons? To answer the question a few months ago I conducted a project entitled Animal Ethics during my ESL (English as a second language) classes in an Italian school. The participants were students (18-56 years old) attending the last year of an evening course in a technical commercial institute. The work is structured into three parts. At the beginning of the case study I will present the constructivist approach, which is the one I adopted and whose use is also suggested by the World Health Organization in the Life Skills Education in Schools Program – an initiative that highlights the importance of growing psychosocial skills at school and explains how to do it – and by the Italian Istituto Superiore di Sanità for the introduction of animal Ethics at school. In the second section of the paper I will analyze the different activities I created and, lately, I will report the results of the experience, final considerations on the didactical path and general reflections on the role of schools in cultivating students’ empathy towards animals.

Keywords

• animal ethics
• constructivism
• didactics
• psychology
• pedagogy
• italy
• italian schools
• ethics
• animals