Animal-assisted learning programs offer unique social, emotional and academic support for student literacy developmentThe environment within which children learn impacts their learning. The purpose of this article was to provide concrete examples of how animal-assisted literacy programs nurture a safe and nurturing learning environment that supports literacy skills development that are both specific and comprehensive. Friesen and Delisle argued that when dogs are involved in academic activities they create an accepting and nonjudgmental learning environment that offers the unique support of providing children with increased feelings of comfort, emotional safety, increased agency, focused task attention, and positive student-teacher interaction as they take learning risks to develop goal-oriented literacy skills.
In this article these authors provide the following: (a) a definition of the difference between constrained and unconstrained literacy skills; (b) a description of animal-assisted literacy program design; (c) a summary of five animal-assisted literacy programs located in four elementary schools in eastern Canada; (d) concrete examples of how human-animal interaction within an educative setting fosters student agency and a purposeful, caring and playful learning environment; (e) concrete examples of opportunities for specific and comprehensive literacy skill development within animal-assisted literacy program sessions; and (f) a discussion of the contributions of anthropomorphism to child development and learning.
Friesen and Delisle found that the adult facilitating the human-animal interaction can supplement learning opportunities by acting as the interpreter of the dogs feelings, ascribing a behavior to the dog in order to address behaviors exhibited by the child, and celebrating learning achievements through petting and rewarding the dog. These authors identified that animal-assisted literacy programs provide opportunities to develop specific literacy skills such as punctuation use, decoding skills, and writing composition such as spelling, capitalization, sentence structure and directionality of text. In addition, comprehensive literacy skills identified by these authors that are supplemented by these programs include opportunities for meaningful writing composition, peer interaction and teaching, practicing reading intonation, and increasing motivation, observation, concentration and social literacy.
The authors noted that animal-assisted literacy programs can provide insight for educational policy and program modifications to support unique experiences for literacy skill development.
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