RSPCA's animal welfare resources provide opportunities for learners to develop the General Capabilities described below.

CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING

Students will apply creative, critical and meta-cognitive processes to make sense of information, experiences and ideas. This process will enable them to construct knowledge and develop understandings that will support their decisions and shape their actions for animal welfare.

ETHICAL UNDERSTANDING

Students will have opportunities to build a personal and socially oriented ethical outlook through the lens of animal welfare. Processes of inquiring into ethical issues include giving reasons, being consistent, finding meanings and causes, and providing proof and evidence. Interrogating such concepts through authentic cases such as animal welfare can involve group and independent inquiry, critical and creative thinking, and cooperative teamwork, and can contribute to personal and social learning.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Students develop capability in using ICT for tasks associated with information access and management, information creation and presentation, problem-solving, decision-making, communication and creative expression. This includes conducting research, creating multimedia information products, analysing data, designing solutions to problems and supporting computation while working independently and in collaboration with others.

PERSONAL AND SOCIAL CAPABILITY

Students will manage themselves resourcefully when establishing goals, making plans, managing projects and implementing actions for animal welfare. They will interact effectively with a diverse range of people in a variety of contexts to come up with new approaches, ways of thinking, ideas and actions for animal welfare. Students will be actively involved and contribute to their community, creating opportunities for participation in animal welfare contexts.

We understand that students and their teachers know better than we do of their individual prior knowledge, levels and learning needs. Therefore, each unit plan is designed to be cut, pasted and adapted to suit the needs of individual learners.

Teachers can choose from a selection of Australian Curriculum levels, learning areas and content descriptors to create learning experiences appropriate for their students’ current learning goals and needs.

Those selected will have more emphasis placed on them and therefore be the focus of formative and summative assessment - in combination with the animal welfare achievement objectives.

A child’s ability to learn and to function as a contributing member of society rests heavily on the development of their social competency and emotional health.

The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2005) states the core features of social and emotional development include the ability to identify and understand one’s own feelings, to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others, to manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner, to regulate one’s own behavior, to develop empathy for others and to establish and sustain relationships.

RSPCA’s education programme aims to support this development, by encouraging students to explore and understand the shared needs of both humans and animals, identify the emotions and feelings that both humans and animals experience in association with these needs and understand how these feelings are expressed (in often identical ways).

Given the correlation between human violence and animal cruelty, RSPCA recognises that educating to enhance children’s social competency and emotional health, has the power to change the hearts and minds of entire communities and that doing so will not only improve the lives of animals, but the lives of humans as well.

Every year RSPCA continues to care for thousands of lost, abandoned, injured or abused animals, attend hundreds of animal emergencies and investigate thousands of animal welfare related complaints.

The figures clearly highlight the need in our communities for education and experiences to break cycles of cruelty. Developing knowledge and understanding about animal welfare, whilst fostering students’ social and emotional development is the key to achieving positive, empathetic and compassionate outcomes for human and non-human members of society.

RSPCA’s Teacher Portal and Student Portal will develop learners’ knowledge and understandings of:

• The Five Freedoms
• The concept of animals as sentient beings
• Responsible pet ownership
• How human activity can affect animals and their welfare
• The social and ethical dilemmas surrounding the scientific and commercial use of animals
• Animal protection at local, national and global levels

Our cross curricular units have been designed to provide teachers and learners with a real life, meaningful context to explore learning areas of the Australian Curriculum.

During these learning experiences, students will be developing the knowledge and understandings about animals’ needs, care, sentience and well-being needed to be informed, responsible animal guardians now and in the future.

Animal welfare is an authentic context for students to develop their writing skills and understandings of writing purposes and processes.

The learning experiences within these units encourage students to research, reflect and write to record and communicate their thoughts, feelings, ideas and experiences about animal welfare topics.

It is hoped that by providing students opportunities to create meaningful written texts, they will be more engaged in the writing process as they will see the tasks as relevant and purposeful.

Writing and reading texts about animals’ needs, care, well-being and sentience will also help students develop greater knowledge and understandings of these topics and therefore support them in becoming informed, responsible animal guardians now and in the future.