Since the Education team’s inception way back in 2005, our goal was (as it still is) to educate the population on dogs, which feeds into Dogs Trust’s wider goal; creating a world where every dog can enjoy a happy life, free from the threat of unnecessary destruction.
And that’s what we’ve been busy doing.
We’ve visited thousands of primary schools across the country delivering workshops on Safety Around Dogs and touching on the importance of Responsible Dog Ownership.
We’ve also ventured on massive tours of libraries, youth groups, summer camps and family resource centres. We’ve done talks at baby fairs, cooperate events-doggy events and many more, but there is one area we’ve not quite conquered yet; Secondary schools.
This is not an oversight. We’ve had our eye on secondary schools since the beginning, but up till now, this area has remained out of reach due to limited resources. Our team have been busy worker bees, workshopping and planning how best to approach a secondary school campaign, and we’ve finally developed the key into this area of education. Our brand new ethics workshop.
Ethics is defined as “Moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity”. We are all guided by our principles, and charities like Dogs Trust face ethical dilemmas constantly. Upon doing our research we discovered that an emphasis on ethics in education has shown to help children to make sound decisions, discover and evaluate their opinions and helps them to make thoughtful and confident decisions.
Dogs can play such an important role in our lives, offering unconditional love and companionship, which has been especially valuable over the past year. We want to nourish this bond and create further understanding of dogs and animal welfare, so what better medium to engage teenage minds than that of ethics? To offer hypothetical scenarios and encourage healthy discussion is something our team is immensely looking forward to and we plan to then continue to educate these pupils with annual visits, offering brand new workshops every year.
A decent hike is always an ethical choice
Although we expect these workshops to be popular among transition year classes, they are designed to reach the entire scope of secondary schools, and it is our hope that we will be invited to schools across the country to deliver this innovative new workshop to teenagers from 1st to 6th year.
The workshop is free, and available both in person (whilst adhering to strict covid guidelines) or online.
If you would like to book out ethics workshop, than contact your local Education and Community Officer today on our booking page. It would be unethical not to!
The Education Team are exciting to embark on this new venture