Patterns of Interactive and Motor Behavior: Animal-Assisted Intervention in Inclusive Education

An inclusive education system generates changes in educational teaching practices and opens the need to implement an innovative methodology to offer more opportunities to the student to participate in an inclusive educational system. Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) bring benefits from human-animal interaction by contributing to the success of inclusive education. This study was conducted through the systematic observational methodology over two case studies of children with disabilities during a school year. The Observational System for Animal Assisted Interventions (OSAAI) has been validated. Observation using the OSAAI system, coding using the LINCE PLUS software and analysis of temporal patterns (t-patterns), using the THEME software, made it possible to obtain behavioral patterns in a systematized way of the interaction and motor behavior between the agents of the triad: the participant, the therapy animal, and the teacher. The results have shown a progressive increase of communicative patterns accompanied by proactive emotional expressions of the participants. These results demonstrate the benefits in cognitive, motor, multisensory, and interactive stimulation reported by the AAI with the student with disabilities of different etiology in an inclusive educational context.