We are a small team of volunteers spread across India and coordinated from Auroville. Integral Education portal is being developed and maintained by Auroville Campus Initiative (ACI), a sub-unit of Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) which is a unit of the Auroville Foundation.
Auroville
Auroville was founded in in 1968 by the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The task of giving a concrete shape to Sri Aurobindo's vision has been entrusted to the Mother. The creation of a new world, a new humanity, a new society, expressing and embodying the new consciousness, is the work undertaken by her. In the nature of things, it is a collective ideal calling for a collective effort to realize it in terms of an integral human perfection.
The Ashram, founded and built up by the Mother, has been the first step towards the fulfilment of this goal. The project of Auroville was the next step, 'more exterior,' seeking to widen the base of this endeavor to establish harmony between soul and body, spirit and nature, heaven and earth in the collective life of humanity.
According to the Auroville Charter, “Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages”. On 28th February 1984, the Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Educational Research (SAIIER) was founded to coordinate and further develop educational research in Auroville through many experimental fields. Over the years SAIIER has evolved into an umbrella organization that has sponsored diverse research units and nurtured several educational initiatives in Auroville.
In September 1988, the Government of India protected Auroville experiment by passing a unique Act of Parliament, the Auroville Foundation Act, 1988. The Auroville Foundation came into existence in January 1991 as an autonomous institution of higher education in the UNESCO category under the Ministry of Education, Government of India.
Over the last five decades, Auroville has established itself as a thriving field of experimentation and research in various fields like land regeneration, afforestation, water conservation, appropriate technologies, renewable energy, architecture, organic farming, social entrepreneurship, social development, arts, innovative educational research, alternative health care and alternative economic models. More than 3200 people from 59 countries are now members of this international community spread over more than 3500 acres of entirely regenerated land giving birth to a regenerative culture and learning society.
Auroville Campus Initiative (ACI)
Every year thousands of students and volunteers come to Auroville attracted by the rich diversity of ongoing experiments and the pioneering practitioners living here. In this context ACI, a sub-unit of SAIIER is working towards facilitating the emergence of Auroville as a vanguard univers-city campus re-imagining higher education based on the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
ACI launched its flagship course Swadharma, in 2016, based on the principles of integral education for the youth of the world to help them find their true calling. This lead to a growing need to understand the principles and practices of integral education and the larger context of the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Addressing this need a second course called Svadhyaya was launched in 2019 focusing on integral psychology and integral yoga which provides the foundations of integral education.
As part of the Svadhyaya learning journey, the students immersed in the study of themselves through the integral perspective and curated contents on various topics related to integral education from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. These topics become the building block modules of Integral Education Wiki (https://iewiki.auroville.org) where we have gathered them to share with the world. Over two years more than 50 topics were curated and a learning community started forming to take forward the life-long learning approaches of integral education in daily life.
Integral Education Portal
The Integral Education portal (https://ie.auroville.org) has been set up to consolidate the knowledge base of integral education through extensive study of the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and to build a peer to peer learning community of practitioners who are applying these principles in their daily lives.
Read more about to whom this portal is meant.
IE Portal Team
ieadmin@auroville.org.in