Arizona State University students visit Rajasthan to understand solar engineers training, Digital community school and rural health work being done

12 students and two teachers from Arizona State University, USA have come to India for 10 days of Global Intensive Experience (GIE) to know and have experience in leadership, solar and a mix of digital, environment sustainable models and impersonal learning. During this trip, on Thursday, they visited Barefoot College International situated in Harmada Kishangarh tehsil of Ajmer district.


 
The students of Arizona State University are here to get an understanding of digital community learning, ongoing solar training and rural health. To understand better about the visit, we spoke to Dr. Susan Carrese, cultural anthropologist from Arizona State University, she shared that she has been visiting India for over a decade now and found out that students here know better about the States but not vise-versa so, she decided to bring students here to get exposure of both urban and rural India. 
 
“During this visit students had an understanding of leadership that helps in service to society, women in solar engineering and a mix of digital and impersonal learning. They would eventually develop a curriculum that would be implemented in Digital community school (DCS) that is being run across India for rural underprivileged students for whom education is a distant dream," she noted.
  
Through this experience students would go back with a bag full of knowledge from rural communities of India, said Dr. Andrew Humphries, an economist who has accompanied students. “As the name suggests GIE is all about the intensive global experience to have a clear picture of various aspects of emerging global democracy. I hope they have more global experience and give perspective on American democracy.”

He added, “Students are divided into two groups; one would go for solar training and the other would be going to the field to have a digital community learning experience and rural health experience. By the end of three days trip, they would figure out key points on which they would develop a curriculum for the digital school being operated across India.”
 
Talking about the Digital Community School, Bhagwat Nandan, Founder BCI shared that it has been a long journey but during Covid they identified 13 schools across India and then trained teachers who have a passion of service to society and now there are approximately 444 students at all centres who are being trained on different subjects like maths, science, environment and there is BCI curriculum (gender equality, hygiene, menstrual hygiene) . “In these community schools, we focus on holistic development of children through examples that are related to their day-to-day life.”