Addressing Needs through Student Choice Policies

Animalearn Supports Project Presented to International Audience

Animalearn, the education division of AAVS, has been working on behalf of students and humane educators for over 15 years. As part of this effort, Animalearn regularly attends teacher conferences across the country, has designed educational materials suitable for all grade levels, and created The Science Bank, a free alternatives to dissection lending library. Animalearn has also been instrumental in introducing student choice policies, whereby students who ethically oppose animal dissection can opt out of these exercises and use alternatives instead.

Sometimes this involves a grassroots effort to change a school or district policy. Often, however, student choice policies are enacted at the local municipality or state levels as legislation, further strengthening students’ rights to choose alternatives over animal dissection. Animalearn has taken on a leadership role in implementing individual student choice policies in school districts and cities across the country, as well as statewide legislation in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, to name just a few. Animalearn is currently working on pending legislation in Michigan, Vermont, and Colorado.

It is important to note, however, that local and state legislation protects the rights of students in only primary and secondary education, not those attending college or university. Nonetheless, Animalearn works on behalf of college students, helping them develop student choice policies. Thanks to the Animalearn staff and the hard work of students, such policies have been adopted in several colleges and universities, including Hofstra University, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. Currently, Animalearn is consulting with students and professors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts to help them create a student choice policy.

The process of creating a student choice policy is a difficult challenge because it must address the needs of both students and professors and appease administrative concerns. In an effort to help explore these issues, Animalearn teamed with Dr. Lynette Hart from the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine in designing an ethnographic study of professors and students at five colleges and universities with current and /or proposed student choice policies. Ten key factors of concern were identified. They involve: specific academic alternatives; responsibility for locating alternatives; technical knowledge; timing of disclosure of animal usage; preparation for advanced study in the biological sciences; and dialogue between students and faculty. By gathering this information and identifying common areas of recurring problems and concerns in developing student choice policies, Animalearn created a usable template of guidelines for colleges and universities interested in implementing such a plan. The purpose of the template is to help all parties involved in developing a student choice policy to be better informed and, hopefully, to have more understanding of the others’ positions and concerns, facilitating dialogue, cooperation, and quick enactment of new policy.

Animalearn is proud to be an author of this study, and Laura Ducceschi shared its findings on the best approaches to successfully implement student choice policies at the 6th World Congress on Alternatives & Animal Use in the Life Sciences, in Japan, this summer. The study was presented as a poster presentation that attendees were able to view, and Laura was available to answer questions and discuss student choice policy in more depth. Response to the research was very positive, with both faculty and students from various international universities taking an interest in how these results could affect a proposed policy at their institutions.

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Contacts: Animalearn, 215-887-0816, info@animalearn.org

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