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The research describes the experience of a southern white teacher who lived and worked in a remote community in Canada's Far North.<p> The impact of physical relocation and culture shock are discussed, as well as problems encountered when conflicting views of education and life goals meet in a cross-cultural setting. The thesis explores some of the difficulties facing mainstream teachers of Indigenous students when issues of past colonialism and present injustices come into play.<p> Inuit community literacies (visual, kinesic and oral traditions) are explored and contrasted with traditional definitions of literacy, which center on the paramount importance of the printed word. Power issues are discussed, including the role played by literacy education in maintaining control in the hands of the dominant culture.<p> The research is qualitative and phenomenological in nature. The teaching experience is viewed through a critical lens, and attempts to better understand the writer's southern white middle-class background as it relates to differing worldviews. The author recounts the process of re-examining assumptions of her own culture, and describes her personal and professional journey of coming to grips with its impact on her teaching.<p>

The research describes the experience of a southern white teacher who lived and worked in a remote community in Canada's Far North.<p> The impact of physical relocation and culture shock are discussed, as well as problems encountered when conflicting views of education and life goals meet in a cross-cultural setting. The thesis explores some of the difficulties facing mainstream teachers of Indigenous students when issues of past colonialism and present injustices come into play.<p> Inuit community literacies (visual, kinesic and oral traditions) are explored and contrasted with traditional definitions of literacy, which center on the paramount importance of the printed word. Power issues are discussed, including the role played by literacy education in maintaining control in the hands of the dominant culture.<p> The research is qualitative and phenomenological in nature. The teaching experience is viewed through a critical lens, and attempts to better understand the writer's southern white middle-class background as it relates to differing worldviews. The author recounts the process of re-examining assumptions of her own culture, and describes her personal and professional journey of coming to grips with its impact on her teaching.<p>

Arctic regions are thought to be more sensitive to climate change fluctuations, making weather data from these regions more valuable for climate modeling. Scientists have expressed an interest in deploying a robotic sensor network in these areas, minimizing the exposure of human researchers to the harsh environment, while allowing dense, targeted data collection to commence. For any such robotic system to be successful, a certain set of base navigational functionality must be developed. Further, these navigational algorithms must rely on the types of low-cost sensors that would be viable for use in a multi-agent system. A set of vision-based processing techniques have been proposed, which augment current robotic technologies for use in glacial terrains. Specifically, algorithms for estimating terrain traversability, robot localization, and terrain reconstruction have been developed which use data collected exclusively from a single camera and other low-cost robotic sensors. For traversability assessment, a custom algorithm was developed that uses local scale surface texture to estimate the terrain slope. Additionally, a horizon line estimation system has been proposed that is capable of coping with low-contrast, ambiguous horizons. For localization, a monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) filter has been fused with consumer-grade GPS measurements to produce full robot pose estimates that do not drift over long traverses. Finally, a terrain reconstruction methodology has been proposed that uses a Gaussian process framework to incorporate sparse SLAM landmarks with dense slope estimates to produce a single, consistent terrain model. These algorithms have been tested within a custom glacial terrain computer simulation and against multiple data sets acquired during glacial field trials. The results of these tests indicate that vision is a viable sensing modality for autonomous glacial robotics, despite the obvious challenges presented by low-contrast glacial scenery. The findings of this work are discussed within the context of the larger arctic sensor network project, and a direction for future work is recommended.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-133).