Educational Sciences, Pedagogical Sciences, Developmental Psychology

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Faculty
- The Auxilium Faculty is an institution of excellence that develops and innovates in the areas of prevention and the holistic education of the person in order to train educational professionals, prepare lay people and religious in the new evangelization environment who are able to dialogue in intercultural and inter-religious settings, and empower women and young people.
Courses
- To cultivate the talent to educate and train education professionals who are competent and passionate, the Auxilium Faculty is constantly engaged in innovating the training skills available and the strategies for teaching and learning, in order to ensure a holistic education in the field of the educational sciences.
Research
- The Auxilium Faculty participates in research in the international scientific community as an interlocutor for reflection in the area of pedagogical knowledge; it also establishes networks with other institutions and provides a specific, unique contribution to the education of women and young people.
Third Mission
- The Auxilium Faculty gives special attention to the society in which it lives.
  Along with its foundational goals of training and research by its faculty and students, it is committed to communicating and promoting pedagogical formation to sustain a culture of life. It understands its cultural mission as a presence "in the service of thought" in "pastoral care of the culture" and in "intellectual charity"; it offers its services in the "territories" in which it functions as a cultural reference centre for the study and promotion of education policies.
Services
- #AuxiliumLife is the strong sense of belonging, the team spirit, and the educational strength of the community to build together a welcoming environment that characterizes relationships; it is also a stimulus to live and study to attain the goal of a degree and actualize the dream of cultivating in ourselves and others the talent to educate.

Home > Faculty > Identity and History

Identity and History

The soul of education, as of the whole of life, can only be a dependable hope.
Benedict XVI

Identitytorna su

The Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences «Auxilium» fosters and promotes research in the field of educational sciences and trains researchers, teachers and professionals, at various levels, in the field of education.
Following a Christian perspective and aiming to help people fully achieve their potential, the Faculty believes that philosophy and theology play a fundamental role in well-balanced training in the field of educational sciences.
The Faculty's understanding of educational sciences respects the different dimensions of education, approaching it from various angles - philosophical, theological, psychological, sociological, historical, legal, methodological and communicative.
The Faculty therefore offers general teacher training, together with specialised study in one of the fields of educational sciences.
In keeping with Don Bosco's principles of Christian humanism in education, the Faculty studies the educational issues related to infancy, childhood and adolescence, with special attention on the development of women.

Courses offered by the Faculty feature:

personalised tutorship;
professors and students from around the world;
the warm and friendly interactions typical of all Salesian environments.

Vision and Missiontorna su

Auxilium is a leading Faculty for the training of education professionals

The Faculty operates primarily in the fields of training, study and research, and has the following aims:

to maintain its position as a leading training institution for education professionals through constant innovation in the training provided and in the teaching and learning strategies applied;
to provide comprehensive training in the field of educational sciences;
to train both lay and religious students within the context of the new evangelism, preparing them for intercultural and interreligious dialogue;
to be involved in the international scientific community as a significant point of reference for reflection and research in the field of education;
to promote humanism which comprehensively protects and educates individuals, using development and innovation to empower women and young people.

Historytorna su

The Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences «Auxilium» is an ecclesiastical Faculty which was founded canonically at the Istituto delle Figlie di Maria Ausiliatrice (Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians or Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco) in 1970.

Its origins date back to 1954, when the Figlie di Maria Ausiliatrice founded the International Higher Institute of Pedagogy and Religious Studies in Turin, which was recognised and approved by the Sacred Congregation for Religious in 1956.

In 1966, by Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, the Institute was incorporated into the Higher Institute of Pedagogy at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome.
The legal and academic ties between the two bodies were later redefined so that by 1970 the «Auxilium» had its own statutes. To this day, however, the Faculty's Chancellor, the Rector Major of the Salesians of Don Bosco, also heads the Salesian Pontifical University.

In 1978, the Faculty moved its headquarters to Rome. Faithful to the original inspiration and guidance of the Magisterium of the Church, it is committed to understanding the requests for training from different cultures in order to provide adequate responses and new perspectives.
With the Holy See becoming a signatory of the Bologna Process, the Faculty is working to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education, aiming to foster mutual recognition of training courses.

The «Auxilium» continues to carry out its academic mission with the practicality and vision typical of the Salesian approach, a heritage which the University preserves and develops.

On 27 June 2020 the Auxilium Faculty celebrated the 50th anniversary of its canonical establishment, remembering with gratitude those who courageously initiated and supported it.

The Auxilium Faculty of Educational Sciences, as it always has, considers itself a “cultural laboratory”, an open and dynamic job site, in dialogue with the socio-cultural challenges that are always replete with questions of meaning and the future, to train professionals in the education field who are apace with the times.

In his congratulatory message for Auxilium’s 50th anniversary, Pope Francis exhorted the instructors to be true educators and encouraged them to continue their commitment to promoting a culture of life “to offer to the Church and society young people who are professionally trained, politically sensitive, and in particular, courageous and enlightened Christians.”

Drawing on the experience of fifty years of activity, the Faculty reaffirms “the need for a truly human university culture”, in the sense that “the culture must be tailored to the human person, overcoming the temptation of knowledge either bent towards pragmatism or dispersed among the countless streams of erudition, and thus incapable of giving meaning to life.
”This is particularly true today; in a time that is “populated by lacerating solitude that is profoundly individualistic, we feel the need for interpersonal relationships”.