Lakehead University Knowledge Commons

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Reconstruction site: excavating and elevating place-based education in Winnipeg K-12 teacher practice
(2026) Burton, Will; Field, Ellen; Greenwood, David; Pluim, Gary; Karrow, Doug; Younghusband, Christine Ho
Many K-12 students who attend public school in Canada will spend their day learning about the world outside of the school, while remaining in their classroom. The rich potential provided from learning in, with and for places, and people that live and work in them, remain severed from their lessons. This has been the model of public schooling for most Canadians since the standardization of the common school over a hundred years ago. In recent years, educational reform movements, such as 'place-based education' (PBE) (Anderson, 2017; Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Gruenewald & Smith, 2010; Vander Ark, et al., 2020), have sought to reconceptualize what, where, how and why learning takes place in an effort to reconnect youth to the communities in which they live, in a social, cultural, historical and ecological sense, while simultaneously bringing to life the curriculum teachers are tasked with facilitating. However, the ways in which K-12 educators utilize the school neighborhood as a site of ongoing learning remains unclear. If, how and why teachers utilize 'places' in their practice is under-researched in Canada (Webber, 2021), and yet, there is no research on the role of place in Manitoba teacher practice. This dissertation comprises a mixed methods research method to understand the current landscape of PBE in the K-12 Winnipeg public education system and specific practices of a group of K-12 teachers. Firstly, a survey on PBE distributed to three school divisions provided four findings: that teachers across the K-12 system, disciplines and locations are utilizing place in their instructional design; that the use of place is focused on cultural appreciation over critical investigation; that place is used to supplement classroom instruction rather than a starting or end point; and, that most survey informants were using constructivist pedagogies, offering a foundation from which to expand PBE practices. Secondly, Greenwood and Levin's (2007) 'Cogenerative Model' of action research (AR) and operating as a 'reciprocal collaboration' (Herr & Anderson, 2012) was undertaken between the lead researcher and three Winnipeg K-12 teachers. The AR study documented the experiences and reflections of the researcher and participants as they designed and facilitated place-based education units between two weeks and five months. Data was collected throughout the project through 'arenas' (Greenwood & Levin, 2007) such as ongoing conversations, pre- and post-interviews and member checking. Findings from this study included participants expressing that place-based education was a powerful pedagogical that aligned with their philosophy of teaching, simultaneously increasing student engagement and inclusion, and offering particularly strong impacts on student understanding the numbered treaties and reconciliation. When Winnipeg is both considered by scholars as "ground zero for reconciliation" (Sinclair, 2024) and facing a number of broader challenges around attendance, engagement and teacher recruitment and retention, the findings of this study suggest that place-based education offers a powerful lens through which to understand, organize and facilitate teaching and learning in the K-12 system, in particular to offer a response to addressing the 94 Calls to Action.
Wind load evaluation of modular housing structures for Canadian Indigenous regions
(2026) Brown, Tristen; Elshaer, Ahmed; Issa, Anas; Wang, Jin; Liu, Kefu; El-Gendy, Mohammed
Indigenous communities across Canada face a persistent housing crisis characterized by housing shortages, overcrowding, dwellings requiring major repairs, and housing costs that exceed 30% of household income. These challenges are exacerbated in remote and northern regions, where communities experience pronounced climate change impacts, including stronger wind events, colder temperatures, and increased environmental uncertainty. Geographic isolation, limited access to construction resources, and harsh climate conditions make it difficult to construct, maintain, and sustain conventional housing throughout its service life. Accordingly, resilient and cost-effective housing solutions suited to these environments are urgently required. This thesis investigates modularly constructed (MC) housing as a sustainable solution for Indigenous communities in northern Canada. MC structures offer advantages in constructability, transportation efficiency, and adaptability to remote conditions while providing opportunities to improve durability and reduce material waste. Although interest in modular systems is growing, previous research has focused primarily on mid- and high-rise structures, with comparatively little attention paid to low-rise MC configurations. Research addressing the combined challenges of extreme wind loading and limited climate data in northern regions is also scarce. To overcome these limitations, this research develops an integrated framework that combines climate data reliability assessment, advanced extreme wind prediction methodologies, and structural performance evaluation of the MC configurations. The first objective (Chapter 2) of this research is to review the ongoing challenges that Indigenous communities throughout Canada face in housing. It explores the structural and socio-environmental challenges affecting Indigenous housing, including climate impact, material deterioration, and constructability limitations. This study proposes modular housing as a sustainable and adaptable solution. Next (Chapter 3), the thesis examines the spatial relationship between Indigenous communities and nearby weather stations to assess data availability and reliability. The analysis identifies significant gaps in meteorological coverage and demonstrates that limited record lengths and spatial variability can substantially influence extreme wind predictions. Third, Chapter 4 applies the Up-Crossing Rate (UCR) analysis to estimate extreme wind velocities using limited wind datasets. Unlike traditional extreme value analysis methods, which require long-term records, the UCR approach utilizes the full wind speed time history to provide reliable predictions for shorter datasets. The method is validated against established statistical approaches, showing strong agreement for long-term return periods while maintaining applicability in data-scarce environments. The fourth objective (Chapter 5) introduces a record length coefficient to correct for the systematic bias associated with short-duration datasets. Using data from over 200 meteorological stations across Canada, the study quantifies the influence of record length on extreme wind predictions and develops a record length coefficient to account for limited datasets. This approach improves the reliability of predictions derived from limited data and supports their use in engineering designs. The final objective of this thesis (Chapter 6) is to investigate the aerodynamic performance of modular housing configurations evaluated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Experimentally validated simulations were used to analyze single- and multi-module low-rise structures subjected to wind loading. The results indicate that modular configurations, particularly those involving stacking and overhangs, can generate significantly higher localized pressure coefficients than those predicted by current design codes. Comparisons with the National Building Code of Canada reveal potential underestimation of critical wind loads.
Regresando a nosotros mismos, diálogos transindígenas y transhemisféricos en Abiayala
(Gusanos de la Memoria Ediciones, 2026) Sánchez Martínez, Juan G.
Este volumen reúne las reflexiones del autor a lo largo de más de diez años colaborando con autores, artistas, mayores y amigos de los pueblos/naciones kofán, wayuu, maya, yanakuna, ikv, mapuche, garífuna, kichwa, cheroqui, haudenosaunee y anishinaabe. En la convergencia entre la investigación activista, la poesía, y las prácticas y epistemologías ancestrales, la triada cuerpo-territorio-textualidades es el fundamento para este diálogo entre saberes. En diálogo transindígena principalmente con la poesía de autoras y autores de naciones originarias tanto del norte como del sur de Abiayala –las Américas en sus dos hemisferios–, Regresando a nosotros mismos explora la confluencia entre el sistema colonial capitalista heteropatriarcal, la recepción de las literaturas indígenas contemporáneas, y la construcción de la raza y la etnicidad de los estados-nación Colombia, Guatemala y los Estados Unidos. Desde esta confluencia multidisciplinar, el autor muestra de qué forma el vocabulario y las metodologías de los Estudios Literarios y los Estudios Indígenas se han transformado en las últimas décadas. Para ello, en cada uno de los capítulos se explora la definición misma de literatura, los límites de la legibilidad de las textualidades indígenas, así como las posibilidades en su recepción – el itinerario del lector y el crítico. Algunas preguntas que se abordan a lo largo del libro son: ¿cuál es el papel de la crítica literaria y cultural en este tiempo de polarizaciones políticas, nacionalismos exacerbados, reconstrucciones identitarias y esfuerzos antirracistas? ¿Cuáles son los protocolos para facilitar estos diálogos transindígenas y transhemisféricos? ¿Cuáles son los límites y cuáles las oportunidades de la traducción? ¿Es acaso la creatividad literaria y artística un espacio idóneo para deconstruir los romanticismos sobre la raza y la etnicidad? ¿Cómo estudiar las textualidades indígenas contemporáneas que desconfían de las generalizaciones sobre “la indigeneidad”, y las clasificaciones “literatura indígena” o “arte indígena”? ¿Hasta qué punto la experiencia ritual y los modos-de-conocer ancestrales permiten su representación en la escritura alfabética? Una invitación atraviesa la diversidad de estos interrogantes: recordar que Abiayala es un solo cuerpo/ territorio. Por ello, Regresando a nosotros mismos es también una bitácora de algunos de los proyectos colaborativos transindígenas, multilingües y multimodales que el autor ha facilitado en estos años.
Evaluating architecture scalability and transfer learning in urban scene segmentation using explainable AI
(MDPI, 2026-03-01) Hatkar, Tanmay Sunil; Pandey, Abhinav; Ahmed, Saad Bin
Semantic segmentation plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving, enabling pixel-level understanding of road scenes. Although transformer-based models such as SegFormer have shown exceptional performance on large datasets, their generalization to smaller and geographically diverse datasets remains underexplored. In this work, we analyze the scalability and transferability of SegFormer variants (B3, B4, B5) using CamVid as the base dataset. We perform cross-dataset transfer learning to KITTI and IDD, evaluate class-level performance, and explore explainable AI via confidence heatmaps. Our findings show that SegFormer-B5 achieves the highest accuracy (82.4% mIoU) on CamVid, while transfer learning from CamVid improves mIoU on KITTI by 2.57% and enhances class-specific predictions in IDD by over 70%. These results highlight the practical potential of SegFormer in real-world segmentation systems and the interpretability benefits of confidence-based visual analysis.
QuantFormer: A hybrid quantum classical transformer for hyperspectral image classification
(PMLR, 2026) Lunia, Jay Vinit; Ahmed, Saad Bin
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is challenging because each pixel has hundreds of spectral bands while only a small number of labelled samples are available. This paper presents QuantFormer, a hybrid quantum–classical transformer that embeds a small variational quantum circuit as a spectral token encoder inside a vision transformer backbone for pixel-wise land-cover mapping. A unified patch-based pipeline with band-wise normalization, principal component analysis, and quantum token encoding is evaluated on four benchmarks: Indian Pines, Pavia University, a 7-class Houston 2013 subset, and EuroSAT_MS. With roughly 35k trainable parameters, QuantFormer attains overall accuracy above 99% on the three airborne hyperspectral datasets and about 89.8% on EuroSAT_MS, competitive with deep 3D CNNs while using substantially fewer weights. Beyond full-data experiments, we also study limited-label regimes and provide practical guidance on when quantum token encoders are a viable alternative to classical projections, without claiming quantum advantage over the strongest classical baselines.