Big Picture Learning (BPL) is officially coming to Garden Valley School division this fall.
The alternative high school program will welcome its first cohort of 15 students in September, operating out of space at GVC TEC in Winkler.
“We had more applicants than we had space for, which allowed us to have enough conversation to ensure that we have a variety of different students,” shared coordinator Carrie Friesen.
“We were looking for newcomers. We were looking for high achievers who are planning to go off to university. We were looking for people who weren’t sure that high school was the right place for them, but they were excited about this model,” she explained. “We really wanted the classroom to look like what the regular people of our community look like.
“I’m so excited to say that because we had a surplus of applicants, we could create this beautiful little microcosm of a true replication of what we have in our community.”
This pioneering group of Gr. 9 students will receive a high school education with an emphasis on practical learning experiences tied to their interests rather than traditional classroom-focused learning.
Students still earn all the course credits they need to graduate with a provincial diploma, but they’ll reach curriculum-based goals in a much more flexible, community-integrated environment. Extracurricular activities and elective courses will also be available to them at the main GVC campus.
The BPL teachers work with each student and their families to develop personalized learning plans that, as they reach the upper grades of high school, will see them spending entire school days each week out on internships being mentored by people who are putting the concepts and skills they’re learning about into real-life action.
Individual internships are less of a focus for the Gr. 9 year as students build their practical life skills and confidence levels, but they’ll still be spending plenty of time learning together out in the community at large.
Friesen likens the program to the Magic School Bus television show, in which Ms. Frizzle would whisk her students away on fantastical adventures to help them learn about a host of topics.
“If we’re learning something in an electricity unit, why wouldn’t we just go to one of our local businesses and say, ‘Can you teach us? Show us how you do this.’ Or if it’s a science unit, let’s go to the Discovery Nature Sanctuary.”
The plan is for these types of frequent field trips and hands-on learning experiences to come about organically as students explore and ask questions about the world.
“So when the kids have a great idea, we can go, ‘Oh, that ties into this’ and off we go into the community to see if we can find the greatest person to teach us more about it,” Friesen said, noting they also hope local organizations will reach out to them with ideas or problems students can explore and address as they build up their skills. “So the kids will see themselves as more than students, but actually community members and citizens.”
This will most certainly be a learning year for everyone involved in the program, Friesen acknowledged.
“It’s a well-supported system that’s been highly researched, that’s evidence-based,” she said, pointing to numerous programs operating in larger school division across the country. “But we are the first rural Big Picture school in Canada. So we’re forging ahead in something that’s relatively new here, even though there are many schools in Winnipeg that are already doing this. But they’re urban, so it is different.”
After spending the past few months reaching out to local community groups and businesses to gauge interest in being involved with BPL, Friesen isn’t worried about finding places with which to partner.
“I cannot be more proud of our community,” she said. “People are stepping up and seeing the value of learning happening within the community, outside of the classroom, in the community, but also with community members. Our community members are saying, ‘We want a stake in how education looks and feels’ and they’re seeing us as bringing something quite valuable to the community.”
GVSD has hired two teachers to help them launch this program; one will remain with this first cohort through all four years of high school while the second will take on the program’s second group in the 2027-2028 school year.
Friesen urges any parents interested in learning more about BPL or community leaders keen on having a hand in helping to educate the next generation to get in touch with her at 204-325-8335 or bpl@gvsd.ca.
“We really want our community to feel that they can invest in this program, because it’s embedded into everything we do.”
The program will also be detailing its first year of operations on social media so that the next group of potential students and families can get a sense for how it all works. Watch for that this fall.
