SAIIER 2019:Auroville Campus Initiative

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SAIIER 2018-19
SAIIER 2018-19 icon.jpg


Auroville Campus Initiative


Entity::Auroville Campus Initiative (ACI) is SAIIER’s Department of Further Learning. Its aim is to build higher education in Auroville. ACI sees Auroville as an integral learning campus and builds long-term programmes for youth & adults. At present, ACI has five programmes:

  1. Swadharma,
  2. Swadharma Plus,
  3. Svadhyaya,
  4. Disha - Auroville Gap Year Programme
  5. Integral Design Quest (beginning 2020).

It also supports other emerging programmes in Auroville.

Activities of the year:

1. Swadharma Programme

Entity::Swadharma is a five week ‘adventure of self discovery in Auroville’ for young seekers of the world. It is an immersion programme run with the support of 35+ resource persons.

In 2018-19 we had Swadharma batches 5 & 6, with 15 participants per batch. The first program ran in Jan – Feb, and the second Jul – Aug.

An Integral Psychologist from Indian Psychology Institute in Pondicherry participated in Swadharma 6 as a researcher to document the learning journey from an integral psychology perspective.


ACI 2019 - Swadharma.jpg


2. Swadharma Plus

Swadharma Plus is a 2-week programme (with 4 month follow-up) to find one's true calling for age 30 – 50. We had the first batch this year, with 5 participants plus 2 volunteer-cum-participants. The programme was held in March 2019.

3. Swadharma Alumni Meet

In March we held a 2-day long gathering with Swadharma alumni with the objective of fostering community and reflecting on individual growth post Swadharma. There were around 12 participants.

4. Confluence on Re-imagining Univers-city

This was a two-day confluence to accelerate long-term learning programmes in Auroville. 100 people participated, on 26-27 February 2019.

The Confluence was built completely bottoms-up. Instead of mentally identifying themes, the themes were identified on the basis of emerging long-term programmes in Auroville. This meant hundreds of emails & meetings in a short-period of time, but it was worth it!


ACI 2019 - Confluence.jpg


5. Disha: Auroville Gap Year Programme (AGYP)

The Auroville Gap Year Programme is a much-needed bridge between Auroville schooling and the next steps in one's life path. In 2018-19, it was a seven month long programme offered to Auroville youth where two months were dedicated to finding one’s true calling and five months to apprenticeship in Auroville units and services. 9 youth participated in this first batch.

6. Integral Education Learning Journeys

In 2018, we held two online learning journeys curating content from Sri Aurobindo & The Mother's writings on Integral Education (IE). We also held a short learning journey with communication designers. Based on the success of the pilot, we will be launching Svadhyaya: Integral Studies Programme from 27 May - 18 July in 2019. We have 2 dedicated editors & multiple reviewers from Auroville and Pondicherry supporting us.

Outcomes:

  1. Auroville Youth benefitted through Auroville Gap Year Programme.
  2. Swadharma has brought many youth to Auroville, many of whom serve and contribute to Auroville after the programme. Two Swadharma alumni have joined Auroville.
  3. Created 19 compilations on 19 topics from the works of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo. It can be found at https://ie.auroville.org.in. 45+ participants benefited through the process of creating these compilations; besides these the compilations are of benefit to teachers/coaches in Auroville who want to create educational material based in the works of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo, as well as newcomers who are new to the works of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo.
  4. Swadharma Plus was piloted for the first time. Like Swadharma, it involved the participation of several Auroville resource people who collaborated & benefitted from the process.
  5. 12+ teams in Auroville working on building long-term educational programmes for youth and adults benefitted from the Confluence talks & work sessions, as well as from the Curriculum Design Workshop.

Reflections:

The Confluence showed the vision of Auroville emerging as a Univers-city; so many Aurovilians inspired by this ideal are actually working towards creating learning programmes. We discovered that there are so many Aurovilians aspiring to build higher education in Auroville – which is the vision of ACI.


External links


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