Freedom is what Tallisen Soong Smith appreciates most about her four years with Wondertree and SelfDesign. That, and the ability to mix learning and play.
“It was only in my later years, in my 20s, that I realized I’d been able to play for longer than most kids in the learning setting,” the former learner and current university student says. “I think that really impacted who I am now. It was just so freeing and open and authentic to be able to play until I was 10 years old instead of having to be in a very structured environment. It became something I treasured.”
Wondertree is SelfDesign’s predecessor. From 1983 to 2009, the Wondertree Learning Centre brought learners aged 5–15 together to learn in person in collaborative groups of up to 15. Each group was supported at the centre by learning consultants, mentors and parents.
Tallisen joined Wondertree in grade 2.
“She was in public school,” mom Marielle says, “and I was looking for an alternative for her. She was such a creative and out-of-the-box child. You know how kids in elementary school, when they do their artwork, they’re supposed to do it a certain way? Well, when you scanned the artwall, you’d know exactly which was Tallisen’s, because hers were always so different. She did not want to conform. And there’d also been some challenges at the public school she went to, so I looked into other options.”
First impressions
“We went and toured the school, and I remember just falling right into place there immediately on the tour, meeting the learning consultants and the other kids,” Tallisen says of her first encounter with Wondertree Learning Centre in Vancouver’s Jericho Park. “In the car after we’d left, my mom asked me, ‘Do you think you’d like to go here?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, obviously, I want to go to that school.’ It was just so different from what I’d experienced in public school.”
Wondertree had made a strong first impression on Tallisen. And Tallisen made a strong first impression at Wondertree.
Learning consultant Darcy Kaltio recalls that first visit by Tallisen and her mom: “This young girl came and walked around. Then she looked at me, and she said, ‘There are rainbows between the hearts of everybody here.’”
Darcy says, “This seven-year-old captured that heart connection that Wondertree and SelfDesign cultivated. She felt it and saw it and described it.”
“Yeah, that was Tallisen,” Marielle says, when asked about the encounter. “It’s, like, wow, she really caught it after just a couple of hours. She totally understood what it was about.”
Tallisen started at Wondertree that year, alongside her brother, who is three years younger.
Freedom to be a child while learning
“Just walking into the building, you could tell there was a lot of freedom,” she says. “We had assigned rooms for the different age categories, but kids were going in and out and joining other groups when they wanted. There was something about it that just seemed to have a natural flow to it. After public school, which is so structured and planned, it was really nice.”
At the start of each day, Tallisen would gather with her age-group peers and their learning consultant in their homeroom to talk about the day. After that, the learners didn’t have classes per se, but they did spend time with different learning consultants and mentors to explore different subjects.
“I remember focusing a lot on my favourite subject, which was science,” Tallisen says. “I really loved human biology, especially when we got old enough to have the sex education unit. One of our favourite mentors that would come in was named Lauren. I really took to her, and I remember being interested in midwifery, as well, when I was young.”
At one point, Tallisen adopted one of the human-skeleton models used at the school. Its hard foam bones were assembled and taped in place, and it was placed on a wheelie chair.
“For weeks, she’d wheel this plastic skeleton with her like a character,” learning consultant Darcy says of Tallisen. “She’d walk around with it, and she would use it as a puppet and make it talk. It was hilarious. And out of that, she learned all the bones in the body and all the organs.”
“I think that was Dead Tim 2,” Tallisen says, when asked about it. “There was another skeleton that we’d named Dead Fred, but I think it was Dead Tim 2 that I adopted.”
As they got older, Tallisen and her peers spent more time outside and worked on special projects.
“We worked a lot in the woodshop room at one point,” Tallisen says, “and I remember being in the computer lab. It was kind of broken up into these sections, but as a kid, I never really saw the timeline of it. It was very much a case of us getting called inside to have lunch, then it would be time to go outside again.”
With a visiting mentor, they learned about owls and dissected owl pellets. Tallisen still has the mouse skull that she found in her owl pellet.
They built many forts.
They built rabbit hutches.
“That was one of our big group projects,” she says. “We used to go catch rabbits down at the blackberry thicket by the school. Each one of us got a box, and we made a rabbit house. It was just temporary, and then we’d set them free again. There were like four or five of us building these things at one time and then bringing them down to the warren.”
One of her favourite projects was to build her first doll house.
“I was building little stairs and different levels with these bits of wood and glue,” she says. “I was really interested in the structural aspect of that. For the longest time, I wanted to be an architect. Being able to explore different areas of study, woodshop, science, biology and medicine allowed me to follow each interest as it came and went. This greatly impacted me when I went into post-secondary and has continued to inform my degree and the path I am on with my education.”
Leaving Wondertree
Tallisen left Wondertree when the school closed in 2009. She spent much of the next year learning remotely with SelfDesign® Learning Community.
And then she was diagnosed with dyslexia. Tallisen started soon after at a private brick-and-mortar school for children with dyslexia and other learning challenges.
“We didn’t know I had dyslexia at the time, but one of the reasons I left public school in grade 2 was because I was struggling,” Tallisen says. “And Wondertree never made me feel — not to be harsh — like I was stupid for struggling. That was one of the hardest parts of public school, feeling like there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t read yet and couldn’t do math, or they just didn’t have the support that I needed. Whereas at Wondertree, if I was struggling, they just helped me. There was never a question of why I couldn’t do this or that, or of forcing myself to do something.”
Tallisen today
After all the learning and creativity Tallisen was able to explore in SelfDesign, she completed her associate’s degree in Classical Studies at Langara College before she moved on to choosing a bachelor’s in Global Humanities and a minor in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University.
She finishes her undergraduate degree this year. For her final semester, Tallisen travelled to Scotland for a study abroad exchange, trading the 1960s–’70s brutalist architecture of Simon Fraser University for the late-Victorian Gothic revival buildings at the University of Glasgow and taking comparative literature, art history and ancient civilizations.
She says, ultimately, she wants to become a counsellor for people with ADHD, a condition she also has. “It’s something I’m really passionate about. I would love to be able to help kids with ADHD be able to function in academia. I want to help other people so they don’t have to have as hard an experience as I did.”
About her early experience with Wondertree, she says, “I got an extended childhood while learning, and I’m so grateful for it. I feel like I have more childlike wonder than a lot of people my age do — I can be serious, but I’m not as serious, I think, as a lot of people try to be in higher education. They helped me to learn things and let me know that if I needed something, I could call on them. I think there’s something really beautiful about that.”
Meet other SelfDesign learners, past and present
Meet other members of SelfDesign’s community, past and present
