Auroville initiatives in outreach education

Auroville, a melting pot of arts, culture, science and society, has been involved in many educational outreach initiatives since the 1980’s. While the Auroville schools follow an alternative education system, many of the educators and enthusiasts of the Auroville community have also developed alternate resources for the mainstream government school systems.

Pad for Pad programme with Ecofemme

“There are mixed messages we give our girls about menstruation,” share Harishini and Kathy from Ecofemme. “For instance, in Tamil Nadu, the family members celebrate the onset of menstruation with a grand ceremony and invitations to the entire neighbourhood, announcing the sari-draped young girl’s womanhood, and then they ask the girls to never speak about their periods, or even hang a piece of menstrual cloth for the family to see for the rest of their lives.” This unhealthy silence, backed by studies across India about the skewed cultural norms and rituals that shun menstruation as a ‘dirty’ ordeal and reinforce decades of negligence towards building facilities or even conversations around female anatomy, reproductive rights and menstrual management, gave Eco Femme the vision to channel their profits from international sales into developing the Pad4Pad program.

The target beneficiaries are girls from public schools in and around Auroville. The typical programme lasts three months, starting with a 1.5 hours session addressing knowledge gaps around the body and menstruation. It introduces menstrual hygiene products including the Eco Femme cloth pad kit which is later gifted to the girl students, with a follow up evaluation to understand the comfort of the girls with the products and their understanding of menstruation.

Harishini pointed out how the girls used to be extremely shy at first, but later they open up and actively engage in voicing the burning questions they always had around the ‘taboo topic’. This sometimes includes things as basic as if periods are a sign of illness. Additionally, Ecofemme faced challenges convincing the school authorities of the importance of such sessions. The breakthrough came when the Eco Femme programme was endorsed by the Chief Education Officer of Villupuram district owing to the positive influence of past outreach Auroville initiatives like Awareness Through the Body.

Today, the Pad4Pad programme is running in 14 schools in the bioregion, and also in 13 partner NGOs in nine States of India. The Pad4Pad programme has set itself an ambitious target of reaching out to 10,000 schools by 2017 as well as training people across India to help women switch to eco-friendly alternatives and create a behaviour change in the outlook towards menstruation.

Garbology 101 with Wasteless

Chandra and Ribhu, siblings raised in Auroville, have developed Garbology 101, a catchy programme developed to help school children evolve a consciousness towards waste. Garbology 101 was first tested in about twenty Auroville and local schools in 2012. The curriculum focuses on creating awareness around multiple dimensions of waste so that the children and eventually the schools understand the need for a behaviour change. For instance, in one of their pilot testing schools the children started questioning the use of plastics for food packaging and switched from PVC lunch boxes to stainless steel tiffin's and water bottles.

The beautifully illustrated and engaging Garbology 101 kit has 7 levels comprising information on waste reduction, waste recycling, waste recovery and activities like story sessions and. games.

Having already reached out to 13,400 students in schools in and around Auroville, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kodaikanal and Kasargod, the team is now preparing a crowd-funding campaign to launch their ‘Pick-it-up’ toolkit. They hope to take it to 5000 schools across the country.

The year ahead looks intense for this young team of four (including visiting interns Darius and Kaya), with ongoing research for developing Garbology ‘light’, a programme in Tamil for public schools, especially around Auroville, to tackle the challenge of waste management in low-income groups. They are also collaborating with a few schools to co-create a waste audit system to help institutions tackle their waste issues and consumption sustainably.

Holistic healing with Thamarai

Stemming from the need to bridge relations between the residents of the bioregion villages and Auroville, Bridget and Kathy started a playgroup for the children of the working women from these areas in 2006. Subsequent conversations with these village women to understand their needs brought in a specific request to support the education of their children, and Thamarai was born as an after-school space for the children.

In the beginning, the children were given homework support, dance and health education. A practitioner from Canada trained the village women in natural healing techniques for children and adults. Thamarai also offered basic health checkups for BP and anemia and give massage therapy and energy treatments to the villagers.

After realizing that addressing individual health needs was insufficient, Bridget contacted Lourdes to understand what more could be done. On his advice, she embarked on an ambitious environmental programme for the village children associated with Thamarai. The children have been introduced to concepts of ecology, health and environment by exposure visits to botanical gardens and sanctuaries, as well as field exercises like water testing and surveys on the natural resources in the village. Muthukumari, a Thamarai facilitator, realized that the problems children face in education can be additionally addressed through connecting body awareness, yoga and the natural environment, so she runs classes combining these five days a week during the children’s lunch hours.

The concept is new and often challenging, especially when it comes to convincing teachers and parents of the need for an extra-curricular programme like Thamarai. Muthukumari believes that, through perseverance, a lot could be translated into meaningful collective action for the betterment of the community as the children's’ consciousness grows.

Sankalpa Art Project with Krupa

Krupa’s Art Projects (the latest being the Art Cart at the Visitors’ Centre) are much loved by children and adults alike, especially those adults who never got to play with colours and paintbrushes in their childhood owing to parental supervision. But art as a healing tool? Krupa narrates how her western education in art healing and India’s harsh reality of youth suicides (especially in the East Coast region), often due to exam pressure or fear of failure, helped her choose art as a therapy for developing the self and self-esteem. While art is mostly offered in Indian schools as another performance-oriented graded programme, Krupa’s art centre focuses on building a safe space for the children to explore their minds and express themselves through their art. Her initial work at Thamarai helped Krupa understand how puppets, masks and dolls could be powerful educational tools and drew her attention towards reviving traditional art practices related to this. Now Krupa is exploring ways to develop art as a tool that can be incorporated in daily life, as a means to learn about social justice, respect and humility. However, especially for young girls who have to perform household duties, it is difficult to make time free for such activities. Krupa tries to tackle this challenge by communicating the value of art therapy as a help in career building in these competitive times.

Peace education Rita

After twenty years of working as a filmmaker in war and crisis areas, Rita realized that the story of conflicts is the same everywhere. Rita could not understand what could change this until she came across Sri Aurobindo’s writings and Auroville. “It was a revelation”, said Rita, “here’s a man who had spoken words decades ago that resonated in my thoughts.”

She quit her job and together with a friend in Sri Lanka decided to work on peace education for children. When the war started again, her friend was called back, but Rita returned to Auroville and with people like Emmanuel, Vishanka, Selva and Maya as well as volunteers, she developed a school curriculum around peace education named “Be True Not Violent”.

Having first piloted this in Aikyam school in 2011, the programme is now fully fledged. It has been translated into six languages and used by over a hundred teachers and 5,000 children in schools, community centres and kindergartens in and around Auroville. In the coming year it will partner with the Auroville Teachers Centre, Peace Mission and earth&us to reach out to more schools across different states in India.

The education programme includes training for teachers in facilitating learning without fear, solving conflicts and developing empathy towards each other. Rita points out that violence is everywhere; it is part of our daily lives even though we do not always realize it. What she finds most shocking is that in India, things like ragging and bullying are often an accepted norm to ‘toughen up’ the students. It is this culture and attitude that the programme aims to address.

Farming class at Thamarai

Other activities

A few other initiatives like STEM education by Sanjeev and his volunteer group, Upcycling Studio of Ok, and Nathalie’s Play with Painting, are also emerging with child development activities in the local schools around Auroville. Education around the world is currently being questioned, tested and experimented with. In such changing times, what we could offer our future generation is probably not solutions, but an alternative perspective to life and living through recreational and innovative educational tools.