Formal prescriptions of a socially acute question in the curriculum of agricultural vocational training courses : the case of farm animal welfare

Amélie Lipp (1) , Laurence Simonneaux (1)

1 EFTS - Education, Formation, Travail, Savoirs

Farm animal welfare has sparked debate Europe mainly challenging industrial breeding systems. This issue is central to European strategy especially where the training of breeders is concerned. The French agricultural vocational course “Bac Pro CGEA Conduite et Gestion de l’Exploitation Agricole” trains students to be able to manage their own farm. The Bac Pro CGEA curriculum was renovated in 2009 and the concept of farm animal welfare was explicitly integrated. Educating for animal welfare raises questions for didactics research as it is not stabilized academic knowledge but a socially and scientifically acute question (Legardez et Simonneaux, 2006). To understand and analyze how teachers and students deal with this concept in agricultural training, it is essential to study, in depth, the dimensions and components of farm animal welfare and also the institutional prescriptions. The first step in our study was to carry out a socio-epistemological analysis of farm animal welfare in order to identify the main actors involved, the current and former controversial aspects and the areas of consensus. The results reveal that farm animal welfare has ethical, scientific, legal, political, social and professional dimensions in which and between which highly controversial points are discussed. The second step was to analyze the Bac Pro CGEA curriculum based on the concepts of social practices of reference (Martinand, 1994) and disposition to act (Bourdieu, 1998). Only a few of the actors and controversial elements are present in the curriculum. The animal welfare issue is neutralized and its origin is assigned to social demand. Only two academic fields are concerned by it and the interdisciplinarity is reduced to technical choices. Our results show that in institutional texts there is a restrictive view of animal welfare which may induce some obstacles to the development of dispositions to act on farms.

Domaines: Education

Amélie Lipp, Laurence Simonneaux. Formal prescriptions of a socially acute question in the curriculum of agricultural vocational training courses : the case of farm animal welfare. ESERA, 2013, Cyprus, Cyprus. ⟨hal-02089735⟩