Homeschooling in Canada

Stefanie Mohsennia

Okanagan Lake


My son Julian is 8 and does not go to school. What might be a scandal in Germany is an alternate educational way of learning in many other countries, which is becoming more and more common in families; life without school. Julian knows no schedule, no curriculum, no homework, no tests, and no report cards. Learning, for him, happens naturally throughout the day, and often throughout the evening, and he learns whatever he is interested in.
 
The Canadian province of British Columbia, where we have been residing for the past year, offers homeschooling families two options; they may either register their children once a year with the local school authorities, or enrol them in a distance learning school. There are no conditions imposed on children registered as homeschoolers. No exams are administered, the child's education is the sole responsibility of the parents, however, the family receives little or no financial support. The alternative is enrolling the child in a variety of distance learning schools. These children are officially not considered as being homeschooled (and the won't appear in the statistics as such), but as "Distributed Learning Students".
My son is enrolled in a distance learning school called "SelfDesign" and it can in fact hardly be referred to as a "school". Their motto is "Allowing children to learn what they love.... and love what they learn". The concept is similar to John Holt's book, 'Learning all the Time': "Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions - if they have any - and helping them explore the things they are most interested in." (Holt, John: Learning all the time, 1989, p. 162)
 
In the current 2006/2007 school year, 475 children, ages 6 through 14, were enrolled at SelfDesign and are being supervised by 50 learning consultants. The ministry pays the distance learning school Can$3,300 per student, that's about half the funding public schools receive per capita. Approximately Can$1,000 of this money in passed on the families to pay for courses, books, etc. In December of 2006, the innovative distributed learning program SelfDesign was awarded the "Prime Minister's Awards for Teaching Excellence" that is designed to recognize the efforts of outstanding educators. SelfDesign received this award as a unique program whose learning consultants work with individual learners and their families, valuing and validating holistic, enthusiasm-based learning, instead of relying on teaching and following a curriculum.
 
Julian needs to log 25 hours of "Learning Activities" every week for 34 weeks of the year (from beginning of September through to the end of June). Additionally, we have to write a report on what Julian has learned in each week. A typical week - were there such a thing as a "typical" week - would look something like this:
Sunday

Mathe
1 hr.
 Watched "Timothy goes to school" and "Daniel Cook" - English
1 hr.
 Helped Dad with constructing a new cabinet - Practical life
1 hr.
 Played CD-ROM "Mathematikus 3" – Math
0,75 hr.
 Listened to "Antonio Vivaldi" (CD about his life, in German) - History
0,5 hr.
 "Henry Ford – Young man with ideas" (Childhood of famous Americans) read to him - History
Monday
1,5 hrs.
 Made a list of all his stuffed animals (by name and type) - German
0,5 hr.
 Watched "National Geographic World" - Science
1 hr.
 Taekwon-Do class – Physical Education
1 hr.
 Set up/roleplayed a "Shop" (calculated change, wrote receipts) – Math, German
0,5 hr.
 "Henry Ford – Young man with ideas" (Childhood of famous Americans) read to him - History
Tuesday

1,5 hrs.
 Read "Pippi plündert den Weihnachtsbaum" - German
1 hr.
 Painting lesson – Creativity/Art/Music
1 hr. Gymnastics class – Physical Education
1,5 hrs.
 Typed list of stuffed animals into Microsoft Word - German, Technology
Wednesday

0,5 hr.
 2 pages from "Math made easy, Grade 2" - Math
2,5 hrs.
 Met with homeschool group – English
1 hr.
 Taekwon-Do class - Physical Education
0,75 hr.
 "Henry Ford – Young man with ideas" (Childhood of famous Americans) read to him - History
Thursday

1,5 hrs.
 Snowboarding class - Physical Education Snowboard
2,5 hrs.
 Skiing - Physical Education
1 hr.
 Built a car with Baufix pieces for a favorite stuffed animal - Creativity/Art/Music
Friday
0,5 hr.
 Played "Flugzeug-Trumpf" (Read six-digit numbers, compared numbers - larger/smaller than) - Math
0,5 hr. Read "Why do volcanoes erupt?" - Science
1 hr.
 Solved problems on www.rechenheft.com - Math
1 hr. "Am Samstag kam das Sams zurück" read to him - German
Saturday
1 hr. Okanagan Science Centre: Experiments with Water and Air - Science
0,5 hr. Watched "Henry’s Amazing Animals" - Science
1 hr.
 Made pictures and videos of self with Logitech QuickCapture webcam - Technology
2 hrs. Played Monopoly (counted die, calculated money) - Math
 
In this example week, we accumulated 31 hours of learning activities. There is no mandatory amount of hours that children need to spend in different subjects. Over the course of several months, we log about a quarter of the hours in Physical Education, another quarter in Foreign Language, since we agree with our learning consultant that activities in English would count as Foreign Language for Julian this year. The remaining half of his hours are spent in Math, German, Humanities, Science, Creativity, and other subjects.
 
I have mixed feelings about writing down the time spent on a subject, because I don't believe that learning can be justified by the quantity of time. The learning processes that occur in our and our children's minds are not observable, nor measurable. Sometimes we're not even conscious of time spent. Recently, while riding in the car, Julian explained to me after a relatively long silence: "Mommy, when you add two odd numbers, the sum is always an even number." An important observation; he had obviously thought about this for a while and tried calculating and working it out in his head, during which time I had thought he was merely looking out the window. Even though this discovery doesn't count for his weekly learning hours, this sort of internal thought processes are at least as important as the learning activities that an outsider can observe. I don't think it's important that my son proves to me or anyone else what he has learned. I experience on a daily basis how competent he is in many things, what he's mastered and what he is engaged in. Not "output", visible evidence of what he learned, are crucial for me, but the learning itself that takes place.
 
Töpfern
 Apart from logging the hours, I send in weekly reports about Julian's learning activities. These contain highlights of the week and I tell the learning consultant about new insights and skills that Julian might have gained. From the reports, our learning consultant extracts information about student's progress and "translates" it into the lingo of the "prescribed learning outcomes" (PLOs) to satisfy the standards of the Ministry. The children's activities are matched to the PLOs in the State's curriculum and the learning consultant can check off what a student has achieved in various subjects. Writing the weekly report is very time-consuming, yet it's worth the time, because it allows detailed retrospection and easy tracking of the child's development. Often times, while I try to recap all our activities of the past week for the report, I realize how all of these little scraps and "mosaic pieces" come together to form the big picture. On a bi-annual basis, the learning consultants, together with the child and/or parents, create a seasonal review.
 
Other distance learning schools record their students' learning progress in a different way. At Ebus Academy (www.ebus.ca), for instance, which has over 1,000 enrolled students throughout the entire province of British Columbia, the children receive Report Cards, issued by their contact teacher, three times a year - just like at public schools. The Report Card is based on worksheets or other samples of the children's work that the families hand in for each subject. Logging a certain number of hours or writing weekly reports are not required.
 
Regardless of how the various distance learning schools assess the students, each school keeps a file on the student that documents his learning progress. The Ministry of Education has no access to these files, nor are they interested in individual students. Instead, they visit and inspect the distance learning schools, holding conversations with the teachers, and making sure that the school is complying with the regulations of the Ministry.

The British Columbia Ministry of Education does not only support the homeschooling families financially with approximately Can$1,000 per year, but they actively promote Distributed Learning. In October 2006, the Minister of Education, Shirley Bond, launched a new interactive virtual school (www.learnnowbc.gov.bc.ca) that links students in grades 10 through 12 to distributed learning courses offered by different school districts. The Province will invest Can$5 million to expand the website and improve services in the coming years. Currently, there are 17,000 students enrolled in distributed learning courses throughout the province.

Our first school year with SelfDesign is close to an end (our last report is due after the week of the 6th-12th of May), and this is an excellent opportunity for a first
assessment - a little over a year after we've moved to Canada. What has Julian learned this year? Above all, he has learned English. Before we moved to Canada, he knew only a handful of words. In the course of one year, Julian learned a remarkable amount of English, mainly through me reading to him, through watching TV and interacting with other children and adults in our homeschool group, in various courses or while out shopping, etc. Now he even understands scientific programs on TV and reads English book almost as fluently as German ones. He recently explained to me in his own words how to use the "continuous past tense" - when you want to express what happened at some point in the past while you were doing something else: "When you called me yesterday, I was going to the Superstore." Not bad for a year without any kind of English classes, I think.
What else has he learned? He joined a Taekwon-Do club ten months ago and has been training regularly, twice a week. He recently passed his Green Belt test. He has also taken two Gymnastics classes, and obtained the respective badges. We've also learned how to ski over the winter, and spent 32 days on the slopes between the months of December through March. Last fall, Julian took a pottery class, as well as drawing lessons with other homeschooled kids. He's practised cursive writing, has worked in several Math workbooks for the 2nd and 3rd Grade, and soaked up a lot of knowledge in a variety of areas from books, TV and conversation.
 
We're enjoying our educational freedom in Canada tremendously. Even though he misses his family and friends back in Germany, Julian is determined that he does not want to go back to Germany. It's wonderful being able to witness how my son invents projects on his own, how he conquers the world, and how one thing leads to another when we let our children take the initiative and allow them to take the responsibility for their own learning. Whoever is interested in following Julian's homeschooling path is welcome to visit our blog: leben-ohne-schule.blogspot.com.

Lachstour

External Links
 
Immigrating to Canada: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/index.html
Homeschooling in various Canadian provinces: http://www.flora.org/homeschool-ca
"Registration" or "Enrollment" in British Columbia: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/dist_learning/ dl_vs_homeschool.htm
Distributed Learning Program "SelfDesign": http://newsite.selfdesign.org/SelfDesignPrograms/SelfDesignLearningCommunity


©  Stefanie Mohsennia, March 2007