Pets As Therapy can no longer offer the January tutorials I had hoped for, they are now suggesting late February early March may be available. This is a problem for me as it means I will miss my 25th of January hand-in. I’m not sure how to evidence my findings without conducting dog tutorials.
I thought I might be able to ask students for a short interview exploring how they think having a dog tutorial might improve the studio space and their relationship to their practice. Once the project is over I could use this before information to contrast with my original research strategy questions about their experience of taking part in the tutorial. I think this before and after could be quite interesting and it would provide me with some useful evidence that I could take to the Dean of students when I’m proposing this as a strategy to be implemented college wide.
I could show students a video about Animal Assisted Education or share a text with them and then ask them what might be good about a dog tutorial. I could also ask them if we had dog tutorials in the studios would it change the studio space? I could also ask them would having a dog tutorial be beneficial to their sense of well-being?
As long as I mention in my presentation that this is an early stage project and that for organisational reasons I’ve done research and spoken to students and then can present how I would conduct dog tutorials I think this might be okay. I’m not sure though so I’ve emailed Vikki to see if I need to rethink this more. My only concern is that I’m running out of time and I’m not sure if I have time to set up interviews and analyse the data before my deadline.