Vancouver BC has an enormous and diverse home learning community, but it is in the shape of a pyramid: a great many younger kids at the bottom, and fewer and fewer in the upper levels. I would speculate that in every single grade, there are fewer home learners than in the one below. Even taking this into account, the drop-off from elementary school age to high school age is probably the sharpest, with a majority of families switching to brick and mortar school in grade 8 or grade 10.
Because of this, the selection of home learning programs for teens is likewise limited. There aren’t enough older home learners to sustain anything like the plethora of home learning programs that are available for the younger kids. We are fortunate here in Vancouver to have so many options for our grade school aged home learners, but it can be a struggle to find organized extracurricular programming for our teens to do during the day.
Outside of actual high school DL/OL programs (distance or online learning programs that cover high school curriculum), there are sometimes a few local options for daytime activities. Some companies dabble in occasional daytime teen classes. These often get canceled due to lack of registrations, but sometimes run successfully for a term or two. Historical examples include swimming lessons, parkour, circus classes, archery, art, ceramics, rock climbing, and others. Home learning cooperatives provide another source of activities. These come and go but there are almost always some strong coops that meet regularly and provide opportunities for gathering, socializing, and learning. They are organized by families, but sometimes hire teachers or specialists to enhance the offerings. Finally, individuals or families sometimes organize teen meet-ups for games, book clubs, social events, or one-offs like museum tours, nature programs, or gallery visits. These might also include educational opportunities like first aid training, crafting, or science projects.
This is one of the things that makes TES Theatre so unusual. As a program for both younger and older home learners (or any youth who are available during the day), it is one of the very few and rare programs that is reliable year to year. We have been supporting the home learning journey since our inception by offering weekday programming for all ages, right up to the end of high school. As well, we can invoice DL/OL programs on behalf of students who have allotment funding. We are a preferred vendor for many of these because of our long standing status as a home-learning supportive society.
In fact, you might not know that TES Theatre (“The Emerging Stage Theatre”) was founded by the registered non-profit group Transforming Education Society (also “TES”), whose mandate is to support student-centered forms of learning. At TES Theatre, we believe in facilitating students’ love of musical theatre through:
- Profound respect for youth and their ability to lead
- Supporting true collaboration and experiential learning across multiple ages
- Ensuring a safe and supportive community space
Our alignment with home learning is not merely a scheduling decision, but a deeply held, governing philosophy. We believe that a collaborative, non-coercive model of decision-making leads to more enthusiastic engagement from youth, more creative input, and a more artistically genuine product that reflects the participants’ vision rather than just the teacher’s. We also believe that respecting the participants as artists as well as learners and individuals supports their developmental emergence and their ability to find and express their own voices, stories, and contributions.
This is true at all levels, but is the most clear in our teen program, when the participants are high-school aged. Our older students are more of a theatre troupe than a theatre class, taking on the material in a more professional, serious, and self-directed way. Some students attend IDEAS high school in the same building, on opposite days, and get high school credit for the Theatre program. Other students report to their own DL/OL’s, and yet others are registered homeschoolers who don’t need to report to anyone, and just enjoy the theatre experience both as a profound learning opportunity, and as a fun, social, and deeply satisfying way to spend their time.
TES Theatre provides a safe space, a dynamic, creative, inspiring space, and a home learning social network for youth of all ages, but especially for teens. Teens get community, a sense of purpose, of accountability, of personal expression, and of creative success from TES Theatre. Not to mention capstone projects. We excel at those too.
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