In recognition that reconciliation will be one of the most important challenges facing today’s learners in the years to come, SelfDesign® seeks to integrate Indigenous culture and perspectives into the everyday learning experience.
The overall vision for reconciliation and learning at SelfDesign® is to integrate and weave Indigenous education and mainstream education seamlessly together so that learner, families, educators and contractors automatically consider both the Canadian Indigenous and the national or international perspectives, ways of knowing and being, and ways of approaching learning.
In addition to nearly a dozen resources provided internally to our community through the SelfDesign Learning Experience Library, here is a list of external resources we have shared with our community to support exploring and understanding anti-racism.
We believe all of our learners are special, but at the Virtual Commencement Ceremony held on June 13, SelfDesign® recognized the Class of 2020 for an achievement unique to them. The group of SelfDesign learners are the first learners to have gone through SelfDesign® Learning Community’s newly designed high school program from Grade 10.
For Patricia Collins, seeing learners embrace opportunities to learn about Indigenous ways of seeing and being and build them into their learning and lives drives her. Read more about Patricia’s journey to become SelfDesign® Learning Community’s Indigenous Education Facilitator.
SelfDesign® has been working to build cultural bridges across and throughout our own organization. Our efforts are driven by the more than 80 recommendations put forwards by SelfDesign’s Indigenous education task force, comprised of a First Nations elder, a First Nations SelfDesign parent and learner, and SelfDesign educators including those with Indigenous heritage.
In February 2019, SelfDesign® Learning Community received a very positive performance accreditation from Cognia (formerly called AdvancEd), a non-profit, non-partisan organization that has been accrediting schools for over 100 years, with a commitment to ensure schools are ‘good enough’ and to help them improve.
SelfDesign® Learning Community provides an inclusive, personalized, and flexible approach to education for approximately 2,000 learners from kindergarten to grade 12 each year. The school offers competency-driven, concept-, project- and inquiry-based learning opportunities that are meaningful and relevant to learners -- including support and opportunity for learners like Ava to prepare a submission for contests such as CBC’s First Page Youth Writing Competition.
At SelfDesign®, we believe that every learner has a unique voice, and our inclusive kindergarten to grade 12 program is committed to listening to each and every child – however they are able to communicate. Every learner with special needs is unique, and we reflect this by providing programming that is personalized or individualized to each learner.
SelfDesign® Learning Community is one of the largest independent online learning schools in British Columbia. If you are interested in providing your child with a SelfDesign learning experience, here is a list of the documents you need to have in place to enrol – and re-enrol.
