SAIIER 2020:Isai Ambalam - Inspiration project
“Inspiration”: Personality development to build constant aspiration
a project of Entity::Isai Ambalam School
Isai Ambalam School is a pre-school, primary and middle school for children who come from nearby villages (in the age group 3 to 13 years). As an Auroville school we have been looking at ways of inculcating universal values, character traits that are in line with Auroville. Values are inculcated through embodying them, and it helps us (teachers and children) to be in an environment that also reminds us of this aspiration. The creation of this environment of constant aspiration is the goal of the Inspiration project at Isai Ambalam. We hoped that teachers and children would act more responsibly by being inspired by this program.
The program was a personality development course for both children and teachers that relies on inspiration through saying, stories, poems, plays, and films to remind us of the constant aspiration towards integral education. The project was broadly based on material developed at the Ramakrishna Mission which uses the words of Swami Vivekenanda as a personality development program. In addition the children learnt or revisited the cultural and mythological inspirational stories of special children, with a view of looking at the deeper values in them.
Description of project:
This project was implemented with 52 children from 5th to 8th grade, Isai Amabalam teachers (13 total) and STEM Land volunteers (9-15 over the course of the program). Most of the children have come from rural villages around Auroville and had not been exposed to inspirational stories, songs from India’s strong spiritual and cultural background. Through this project they became aware of many of these including the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharatha, looked at through the lens of values and character traits.
In first month, each week the researchers had a meeting to discuss how we would implement this project and what the indicators would be. From these conversations we came up with key areas that could indicate our progress as a school in our aspiring towards integral education. Our key values were:
- Check one's integrity.
- Moving from accountability to responsibility.
- Breaking silos and groupism.
- Effective use of unorganized/free time.
- Self-discipline.
- Self-improvement.
- Self-confidence without putting others down.
- Concentration.
- Mediation.
We conducted a pre-survey for both children and teachers with questions based on the above areas to find the overall perceived current state of our school. We also gathered public domain reports by Auroville schools where they describe their work on values and their matrices.
We started the implementation of the project in July 2019. Mr. Krishnamaharaj from Chengalpattu and Anita were the backbone that helped the groups understand organize and give ideas to start this project.
In our school we have a sleepover once a week as well as Saturday school, a day of activities. On Saturdays from 9am to 11am all the teams worked on project-related activities. Each team was composed of children, teachers and youth volunteers. It was a special activity that broke the silos of what each of us otherwise do at the school.
In this project there are 2 phases. In the first phase there were 6 groups of children and teachers. Each group took one divine child related to one value:
- Self-confidence – Markendiyan Story
- True Education (holistic development) – Prahalada story
- Real Personality (discovering a deeper self) – Thiruganantha Sambandar
- Real worship (service to humanity as worship) – Namdev story
- Art of Meditation – Duruva story
- Secret of Concentration – Arjuna story
Every week each group worked on something like reading a story, quotes and sayings told by Swami Vivekanda related their story, singing a song, drawings, essays, and preparing a PowerPoint for their story. Each Saturday first we had 15min (aana pana) meditation and then one group or two groups presented their work to other groups.
Finally, each group took more than one month to prepare scripts, practice and make a short film on their stories with connection to real-life scenarios, and presented these to the other groups. In the second phase six groups merged into 3 groups to take up more complex topics:
- SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) group – Sundaragandam (Ramayana)
- React, Respond and Realise – Srimad Bagavatam (Parikshit)
- Forbearance, Tolerance, Acceptance and Fearlessness – Mahabharatam (Yaksha – Bagavatgita)
This time 4th graders also joined in three groups. The children felt the need of the values and started learning naturally. They came to know the importance of values through Ramayana, Mahabharatam and Srimad Bagavatam through certain areas.
Finally, they performed their learning knowledge through drama and puppets. In between the program, quiz questions were asked to motivate them and bring their concentration to focus on other groups.
At the end of the 2nd phase, we had planned to conduct a post-survey of the same questions as the pre-survey, to see the improvement of the school towards integral education. But we were only able to conduct the post-survey for the 8th grade children, not for the other grades or the teachers, due to the coronavirus lockdown.
Outcomes:
This project has broken groupism and silos between subject teachers, grade teachers, volunteers and children across different grades, creating a collaborated learning community. It has given opportunity to bring the children's various potentials like recitation, drawing, acting, singing, playing the tabla and the same in teachers especially filming, special effects using green screens. Values have been imparted through stories, songs, quotes, puppet shows, short films etc. The values are revisited in different ways and in different contexts, and we hope they will stay with us for time to come.
We researchers noticed many improvements in the groups through these activities including sharing materials, helping each other, time management, active participation, appreciating others, etc. Some of children from elder grades voluntarily went and helped another group by singing a song for that group, and the children have developed the sense of self-confidence in their actions like presenting their work to other groups.
Due to the Corona shutdown we have only been able to conduct the post-survey for 8th graders so far. Through the post-survey we notice:
- Children who said that they couldn't concentrate in class in pre-survey, are able to concentrated in their project. Which taught them they can concentrate their class as well.
- Children who said that they have not eaten everything served in the school in pre-survey learned values like tolerance and responsibility to health from this project and now they are eating everything served at the school.
- Children who said that they do not use their free time usefully and to learn new things, are now using most of their free time to learn new things.
- Also “How often am I honest” has improved when compared to pre-survey.
Reflections:
Many teachers reflected that the values and sayings were seeded in the mind of children, e.g. a child who encountered an incident that had earlier led to the child being disturbed or distracted in class, responded to it differently, reflecting on a powerful quote or learning from a story and moving on. Children are more able to realize that they had not been the best they could have been.
Teachers learnt to take what was learned into their classrooms, and that the children were more present in their classes when this was done.
Preparing related materials helped children understand values easily and connect them to real-life incidents. Selecting appropriate stories related to values helped in breaking children’s and teacher’s mindsets and stereotypes like groupism (“I belong to this community so I should not read epics,” “I am not good at singing so I will not sing,” “It is not possible for me to act or record,” etc). It has led to significant improvement in time management and creating and conducting activities.
Conclusion:
Values are the criteria by which we measure the quality of our actions and our life. The earlier these become part of our being, the better our life is, and children around 9 years old seem to be able to take to values explicitly through stories, songs, creating films, powerful sayings. Imparting value education can support having right impressions formed in the child's mind, and will guide him throughout his life and what he does in society.
We are sufficiently encouraged by this year to continue our work in this area next year:
- We will conduct the post-survey to review the clarity of understanding of values as well as how children and adults feel the project has supported them having a stronger aspiration based on the indicators.
- We will also review all the presentations that had made an impact, e.g. experiential learning, mini research within the school, etc. and create a database of these. We will also see where these were effectively interrelated with curricular learning.
- Careful review of literature survey with the lens of creating a similar program and putting together the resources already available from Auroville schools, Auroville outreach schools and Ashram that can be useful for this project.
- We hope to consolidate all these useful resources to create a yearlong program in the context of Auroville and the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.