New PBL approach to veterinary teaching in southern Indian Veterinary Schools.

Title: Embedding a Problem Based learning approach to teaching animal welfare to veterinary students in southern Indian Vet Schools.

Following three extremely successful British Council sponsored animal welfare education and problem based learning workshops facilitated by animal health and welfare lecturers from the R(D)SVS, and hosted by the Kerala Veterinary and Animal Science University, JMICAWE’s Prof Nat Waran returned to join representatives from each of the workshops to hold a ‘wrap-up’ symposium.

Over the two days at the end of April 2013, KVASU Faculty members were joined by their Deans and the Vice Chancellor, Dr Ashok to showcase what they had learned and how they planned to implement the approach, to an audience of 50 academics including VC Dr. V. Prabhakar Rao of Sri Venkateswara Veterinary University in Andhra Pradesh and Deans from Bangalore Veterinary School as well as Directors of local research institutes from the South of India.

There were a number of key presentations including one on ‘Future Proofing Veterinary Education’ and another on ‘Humane and responsible use of animals in research and teaching’, given by Prof Nat Waran, as well as stimulating presentations given by representatives from each of the three workshops.

The meeting ended on a high point, with a clear commitment from a number of other vet school faculty Deans to hold further workshops involving the JMICAWE in collaboration with the KVASU faculty staff, to share best practice in teaching methodologies and in the delivery of animal health and welfare knowledge and skills, to staff, working within these other Universities.