AN ARTISTIC TAKE ON EDUCATION
Amutha Saravanan
DA VINCI GROUP PTE LTD
"The business doesn’t fail, you fail the business. Everything is on you to make it a success, because your actions will cause the trajectory of events and outcomes."
Founded by Amutha Saravanan and Saravanan Manorkorum in 2012, Da Vinci Group is a company in the field of education. By using art mediums coupled with scientifically-backed Neuroeducation, Da Vinci Group aspires to enhance learning and make it fun.
Maintaining the principle that learners learn better through tactile and sensorial experiences, Da Vinci Group has created NeuroCeramics®, a proprietary tool and platform that has been successfully applied to all its programmes for learners of all ages. Through pottery creation, students gain better tactile cognition, and the ceramic wares serve as trigger points by which the students remember the concepts introduced.
NeuroTheatre® also forms an integral component of Da Vinci Group’s pedagogy. A curriculum developed based on process drama,
it involves a method of teaching and learning drama where both participant and facilitator work in and out of role, and introduces various concepts and dramatic tension to enable them to proactively challenge their thinking and express challenging concepts.
If you met Amutha Saravanan several years ago, you likely would not be able to recognise her from the person that she is today. Reserved and quiet, she was not the type to mingle and talk business. All that changed in 2012 when she and her husband, Saravanan Manorkorum, founded the Da Vinci Group, an educational enterprise born out of a desire to transform conventional teaching and learning methodologies by combining neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and art.
Brought up in the environment of a traditional Indian family, Amutha has parents who wanted her to become a doctor, lawyer or an engineer. Being quite the conformist and obedient child, she performed well in school, but biology — a prerequisite subject for would-be doctors — was something she never took. She did, however, stumble upon a book during her years in junior college that dealt with how the human brain works. It spurred her interest in neuroscience, and would set her on a career path whose destiny lies in reshaping how our children learn.
How is Da Vinci Group different from similar concepts in the education sector?
Where do you see your business five years down the road?
We are expanding to Japan and hope to set foot in the region. I really want to see the Da Vinci Group being looked upon as a thought leader and pioneer in education. At the end of the day, it is a question of how you actualise the potential of a child as a thought leader in education, one that is creating a pedagogy that is a supplement and complement to everything else that is out there, so that we can make our children happy future leaders of a world that we cannot keep tabs on anymore.
