Brent’s daughter Ilana was born in 1977 and grew up on their homestead near Creston, B.C. Brent and his wife Maureen loved watching their child grow into toddlerhood and beyond. The couple began to notice, as most new parents/guardians do, how learning came naturally to Ilana. With encouragement rather than direct instruction, young children learn how to walk, talk, and more. Brent and Maureen quickly realized that parenting had a lot to do with tuning into Ilana’s natural rhythms, interests and desires, coming from a place of mutual respect where natural learning could be fostered. They watched Ilana bloom.

After five years of going through life in this way, Ilana was enrolled in kindergarten at her local school. She found herself in a new world, where the structure, bells, and the environment of instruction rather than cooperation were foreign to her. After just a few weeks, Ilana came to her dad and asked if he could be her teacher at home instead. As a certified educator, and after discussing it with Maureen, Brent decided to do just that.

The couple moved to Vancouver and started the Wondertree Learning Society. The society operated a group 1 independent kindergarten to grade 9 school called the Wondertree Centre with an enrolment of 12 to 20 learners. Each morning, Brent and the learners would discuss what they wanted to do that day and how to make it happen. The learners helped budget their tuition money, deciding together what activities and learning experiences were of interest to them.

One such learning experience occurred when they saw a mime busking on a street corner and ended up hiring him to work with them for several years mentoring the children about creativity and choice of response. Spontaneous activities arose each day that would link to culture, history, math, geology, the arts, as well as the then-upcoming field of computer programming. A new way of learning was born, based in curiosity and relevance and carried forward by the passion of these young learners.

Wondertree Centre ran from 1983 to 2009. The evolving group of learners, including Ilana, developed cutting-edge group projects that often put them in the public eye. Brent’s dream, to have learners take the lead in their own learning as it naturally unfolded, became a reality and a model for educational programs to come.

Beginning in 1993 through 1996, Wondertree Learning Society operated Virtual High, a grade 9 to 12 education program with an enrolment of 50 learners. The society’s name was later changed to the Wondertree Foundation for Natural Learning (1996) and subsequently to SelfDesign Learning Foundation in 2010. SelfDesign Learning Community, the distributed version of our learner-led program, began in 2002 and continues to the present time, influencing British Columbia’s personalized learning approach through its long history of successful lifelong learning journeys over the past several decades.

Although we have evolved and grown significantly since 1983, the philosophy of SelfDesign — first introduced by Brent — has remained at the core of the organization’s operations and program offerings.

This philosophy supports people of all ages in authoring their own lives and designing their own learning. Based on relationships, conversations, and reflections, the model encourages a deep understanding of ‘self’ in connection with others and supports learners in the development of self-agency, collaboration, and a sense of personal and social responsibility.

SelfDesign is a model for education that shifts and challenges the standard for how children learn at school. By seeing learning as circular and non-linear, rather than having a beginning and end or set of outcomes. From imagining to planning to enacting and experiencing to reflecting and assessing to re-imagining…this process for learning lasts a lifetime.