SAIIER 2020:Auroville Campus Initiative

SAIIER 2019-20

Entity::Auroville Campus Initiative (ACI)

Auroville Campus Initiative (ACI) envisions Auroville to be a new type of university campus where learning is through doing and integral living. ACI wants to address the holistic educational needs of the youth who are coming to Auroville along with the youth who are growing up in Auroville. ACI wants to enable this emergence through offering learning programmes, networking among various teams in the Auroville ecosystem and facilitating the emergence of learning programmes.

This year our special aims were:

To launch Auroville’s first long-term online learning programme for adults – from outside as well as from within Auroville; this we did through launching Svadhyaya,
To begin conceptualising a semester-long programme offered from Auroville to both youth from outside and within Auroville,
To document our learnings from running Swadharma thus far, so that it can become a replicable model,
To organise faculty training programme for University professors, to begin to learn about teacher training at the higher educational level,
To develop a relationship with Auroville Youth through the Disha, further learning Desk,
To network with other players in the field of higher education,
To launch a platform that can be a first-go-to-place for students wanting to study in Auroville (https://edu.auroville.org)
To keep the idea and ideal of “Re-imagining Univers-city” alive in the minds and hearts of Aurovilians.

Activities of the year:

Name	What	When	Who
Swadharma	Swadharma is a five week ‘adventure of self discovery in Auroville’ for young seekers of the world. It is an immersive programme run with the support of 35+ resource persons.	Jul - Aug 2019; Jan - Feb 2020	30 youth from all over the world. This year we had Swadharma batches 7 & 8, with a total of 30 participants from India and abroad. There were a total of 4 international participants. Batch 7 took place in July-Aug 2019 and Batch 8 took place in Jan-Feb 2020.
Svadhyaya	8 week long online programme in integral studies	Jul - Aug 2019	24 adults, including one newcomer, from all over the world (majority Indians)
Prerna 1 & 2	One week long custom programme to help young seekers become inspired by Auroville	Dec 2019; Jan 2020	1) Vietnamese students exploring alternatives; 2) Psychology students from Auro University
Integral Education (IE) Faculty Training Programme	10 day long faculty training programme for faculty members from Auro University	Jun 2019	10 faculty members from the fields of psychology, design, IT, marketing, business, law, hospitality
Auro University Visit	2 day long visit to Surat for follow-up with faculty members, guidance given to the IE team at Auro as well as for guest lectures with the students	Nov 2019	Faculty members who attended the IE faculty training programme, Psychology students, Faculty members working on IE at Auro
Edu website	A website to enlist long-term learning courses offered from Auroville	Nov 2019 onwards	Beneficiaries: Students from all over the world, Aurovilians who are offering courses
Edu Desk	A free-of-cost service to Aurovilians for designing new courses and programmes	Jan 2020 onwards	Aurovilians who are planning to offer courses
Installation on Re-imagining Univers-city	A two day installation on Re-imagining Univers-city as a follow-up to the Confluence wherein Aurovilians mapped their learning journey in Auroville.	Feb 2020	About 100 Aurovilians. 36 Mentor sign ups.
Disha, further learning desk	Further learning desk for Auroville youth. Proactive engagement with youth through organisation of night learning sessions at Youth Center.	Nov 2020 onwards	Auroville Youth
Curriculum Design Workshops	Curriculum Design Workshops with Gitanjali as a follow-up to the Confluence, to help Aurovilians create courses.	May 2019; Sep 2019; Dec 2020	50 Aurovilians. E.g, Richa and Rivu launched Film Institute, this year Krupa is launching a course in Art Therapy.
Indian Renaissance Seminar	On the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhiji as well as the upcoming 150th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo, we organised a two-day seminar on Indian Renaissance, focusing on Swaraj and Sarvodya.	March 2020	Aurovilians and people from all over India. Total 30 people.
First Person Exploration	Research in psychology is dominatedly third-person or second-person based. However, yoga gives the possibility of first person research. To explore that, we held a learning journey with interested participants and researchers in psychology	Oct - Dec 2019	Participants from India

Outcomes:

Overall the idea of Auroville as a Univers-City has gained momentum and AVI now sees this as one of their key focal areas.

Research highlights:

1) Our “Swadharma Case Study” was shortlisted in the top 17 case studies for “Social Change” by Azim Premji University, out of 90 stories of change. Through the Swadharma case study, our primary finding was that the Swadharma programme works on the seed, and through its work on the seed, it creates a ripple effect in the society. This means that by itself Swadharma does not work on social change only. However, by providing an integral foundation to privileged youth of the nation and abroad, it prepares individuals to become change-makers working for society, environment and integral self-development. We are further probing into this research through a thorough research of Swadharma alumni.

Swadharma Case Study 2019-20

PDF (41 pages)

2) Our project “How does learning happen in Auroville?” is based on the living research, where Aurovilians mapped their learning journeys using threads on a co-creative art-installation with 28 keywords describing unique elements of Auroville.

We found out that the top three most significant contributors to our learning in Auroville are:

The Inner Work: (Key words: Silence, Intuition, Aspiration, Self-discovery)
Learning by Doing
The City Environment (Key words: Nature, Beauty, Matrimandir)

The areas, however, where we scored relatively less are:

Collaboration (keywords: Peer to peer learning, collaboration, brotherhood)
Cultural Education (Keywords: Universal culture, learning from the cultural diversity)
Engaging with Global issues (keywords: Addressing global challenges, global citizenship)

Reflections:

The most meaningful this year:

The response to Svadhyaya, an online course in integral studies, was deeply meaningful. It was amazing to see participants self-curate online learning journeys around 12 qualities of the Mother by themselves and invite us (facilitators) to their presentations! They have completed two 40 day journeys on Sincerity and Humility. Presently, they are collectively studying, working on and learning about Gratitude.
We were also satisfied by the effect of a faculty training programme with Auro University faculty members. It gave us the confidence that learning in Auroville can be meaningfully applied in diversity of contexts, including a highly limited academic environment. This could happen because our modules were based in the fundamental principles and faculties of Integral education as given by The Mother & Sri Aurobindo.
We tweaked the Swadharma schedule and were happy to see the response to the newly introduced changes to the schedule. This included Individual guidance sessions, a schedule with a better flow and relationship between different sessions, new sessions such as on boundaries, intimate-partner relationships etc.
We saw that the idea of the Univers-city really picked up the community. There is a growing attention to higher education, with growing number of people wanting to work in the field, based on the groundwork of ACI. This is very uplifting to see.

The most challenging aspect this year was ACI's legal status. As of now, ACI is unable to carry out fee-based programmes out of SAIIER; thus, it is working as an activity through ICI, LEAD. However, it has grown beyond the limits of being an activity. And thus, FAMC has recommended ACI to register as a unit. ACI wants to register as an educational service for all, focused on higher education. Especially in light of the fact that Auroville Foundation is registered as an institute of higher education within GOI, we feel higher education is very important to the pulse of Auroville and should not be treated as commercial activity. We found much difficulty in finding the appropriate structure for us. We are still struggling to find the clarity & suitable guidance on this topic of critical importance. We feel some suitable policy focus on higher education & organisational restructuring (with dedicated trust/unit and funds for youth to follow learning in Auroville) would help prepare a more nurturing ground and ecosystem in this direction.

Future direction:

For the next year, we wish to create more online learning courses/content as well as prepare to launch Auroville City Semester – a four-month programme for 20 change-makers, who wish to learn how to apply a new paradigm in action, engage in solving real-life problems through community service, dedicatedly work on themselves… These change-makers will be learning and volunteering in Auroville. The theme of the first Auroville City Semester would be Water, and it is being planned in collaboration with Guilio, Ing-Marie, Aditi and Mukta. We are fundraising for 5 Auroville youth and youth from underprivileged backgrounds to participate in the programme.

For Swadharma, our third intention is to deepen our research about our programme through alumni research. The need to engage the growing alumni base was identified and there will be greater efforts in that direction next year. A research of the impacts of the Swadharma programme has been initiated. Due to the Covid-19 situation, Batch 9 of Swadharma which was scheduled to commence on July 19th, will be postponed to January 2021.

We are in the process of making an ACI website.

In light of Covid, we have organised two webinars around perspectives on Corona Crisis to Transformation and one workshop for Aurovilians to learn how to organise online workshops, classes and courses. We have also been sharing our paid video conferencing details with several Auroville groups to to meet their learning requirement.

We are part of a newly formed higher educational group along with representatives from Savi, YouthLink, Anveshan, Sangili, Auroville Research Platform, (erstwhile) Living Routes and we are excited to see where it leads.