Programs

Shawnigan Innovation – Powered by CASE

It would be an understatement to say that a tremendous amount of dedication and creativity has gone into delivering SOUL (Shawnigan Online Unique Learning) by all members of the Shawnigan staff in recent months. A spirit of innovation, collaboration, and hard work has allowed our School to pivot successfully in the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to deliver an educational experience valued by all.
 
The primary objective of SOUL is for the School to continue to build and nurture its community. As Headmaster Larry Lamont says: “We shall navigate the waters ahead with compassion, enthusiasm, optimism, good humour, the Shawnigan spirit – and, most of all, together.”
 
A key contributing factor in that collective effort and the “unique” in the SOUL acronym is CASE – a concept and name coined by Carl Bradley ’78 (Groves’) and the School’s previous Headmaster, David Robertson, representing Communications, Arts, Sciences and Entrepreneurship.
 
The Bradley Family Foundation established CASE to provide Shawnigan students and staff with boundless opportunities to explore and create. As Carl is quick to convey, “CASE cannot be put in a box.” It is not a department or an office, but rather an ethos – an ideology with muscle both in the form of stewardship and infrastructure. CASE enables technologically supported innovation at Shawnigan and has provided key elements in many of the School’s recent SOUL offerings. For example, CASE has supported Shawnigan’s education staff in the successful transition to an online teaching platform through its acquisition and installation of Avid NEXIS high-capacity tiered storage servers.
 
Before COVID-19, student-led initiatives and programs supported by CASE were already delivering regular School content to our community through livestreamed Chapel services, sports events, and musical performances, as well as student films, digital art installations, robotics tournaments, eGames, on-line food ordering services and many other creative and innovative offerings. According to Nigel Mayes ’89 (Ripley’s), Chair of the CASE Committee, “CASE is about empowering our students with the medium of their time.”  
 
Now that we are living within the constraints of a pandemic, SOUL is offered in many different ways to community members dispersed around the globe, allowing students and their families to become actively engaged despite being so far removed. Faculty members are currently utilizing CASE resources in IT, Film Arts, Recording Arts, the Music and the Fine Arts departments, Sciences, Astronomy, Robotics, Athletics, Entrepreneurship and Economics. A sampling of SOUL projects delivered with the support of CASE resources include:

  • Daily student submissions and creations on platforms such as FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter
  • A student-only #SLSTogetherAtHome presence connecting the entire student population
  • Regular musical instruction, open-mic nights, guitar lessons and “back-track” recordings for various musical compilations, including the latest alumni virtual performance of “There’s a Voice in the Wilderness” – all made possible by the School’s state-of-the-art audio recording production studio provided by The Bradley Family Foundation
  • Regular broadcasts of Saturday’s ‘SOUL Man’ Chapel Services, Awake My SOUL messages from the Headmaster, mid-week Community Heart & SOUL programming, and The Early Late Show, a student news offering with rotating student anchors, original musical performances from the student body, challenges and shout-outs across the entire Shawnigan community and much, much more
 
To store the vast amounts of creative material being produced daily, the School counts on the Nexis System, a broadcast level, proprietary server from industry leader Avid that stores the abundant amount of data being produced across Shawnigan by film arts, graphic arts, photography classes, yearbook and many other departments. According to Nigel Mayes, “The infrastructure and staff behind CASE have enabled us to add all the extra video communication, art and music to our SOUL program.” Shawnigan’s educational staff have achieved an admirable standard with online academic delivery, and the creative content has added an inspirational element.
 
Tools to enable these successes include Shawnigan’s fully Avid-equipped film production facility, with industry-level pro-editing stations; Atmos-equipped screening room and think-tank inspired teaching spaces; our 12-station digital photo lab and portrait photography studio; and our digital graphics lab with operating industry standard digital products. Students have access to the entire suite of Adobe tools both in class and on their own devices, and weekly tutorials have been very helpful in assisting students with their graphic creations. On the music production front, the School utilizes the industry-recognized standard ProTools Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) package from our partnership with The Bradley Family Foundation and Avid, which is also available to students to operate remotely on their home computers. Music students can complete full sound mixing projects in a distance-learning environment.
 
Nigel cites several student-led initiatives as some of the most powerful examples of CASE, including the genesis of the Robotics Lab, 3-D Printing, virtual design, iOS app development, rack server infrastructure design and, most recently, the ability to manipulate data captured by the School’s Observatory.
 
Last week, Carl Bradley arranged a meeting for staff and students with Brad Porter, Amazon’s Vice President and Distinguished Engineer for Robotics. This extraordinary opportunity to connect with a leading industry expert represents the CASE ethos: put the right elements into a collaborative environment, provide the support needed to explore where the conversation might lead, and watch the process evolve. Not every experiment works, but with student creativity fuelling the CASE furnace, we have discovered many fresh avenues to explore. Shawnigan young people have 21st century dreams and radically diverse future career paths that extend beyond traditional thinking, so CASE’s approach to creative, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary learning is an exceptional educational opportunity.
 
Thanks to Carl Bradley’s visionary outlook, the generosity of The Bradley Family Foundation, and support from a broad base of donors inspired by CASE programming, the possibilities for inspiration, creation and support are boundless. We will no doubt be reporting on continued, new and exciting outcomes “powered by CASE,” for many years to come.
 
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We acknowledge with respect the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional lands and waterways we live, learn and play. We are grateful for the opportunity to share in this beautiful region, and we aspire to healthy and respectful relationships with those who have lived on and cared for these lands for millennia.