Theme Schools: From Manifesto to Paradigm for Undergraduate Students

In sciences, when anomalies or discrepant observations generate a crisis, so that the old way of looking at things no longer suffices to explain or predict observable events, scientists construct a new paradigm (Kuhn, 1996). Despite vast differences in our backgrounds and in the attributes of our widely separated home institutions, we have arrived at strikingly similar perceptions of the need to fashion a new paradigm within undergraduate education. By aligning the anomalies and assembling experiences from several correlative efforts within the old paradigm, we have begun to distill some tenets of a coherent rationale for student-centred learning, built around the concepts inherent in a "theme school." These tenets are especially relevant to small, widely dispersed northern communities. Much of the following discussion originates in our shared disappointments with the effectiveness of education by the traditional Euro-American undergraduate paradigm when applied to northern environments and rural communities. Nevertheless, we are not institution-bashing: we owe much, after all, to the institutions that provided us with a point of departure for exploring alternatives and supplements.