Just outside the doors of the Exchange Met School in Winnipeg, are stories most people walk past every day without realizing it. For teachers Kathryn Laframboise and Jonathan McPhail, helping students uncover those stories led to a powerful school-wide project, and national recognition through the 2025 Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Teaching.
The project began with a fire.
“There was a fire on Main Street [next] to a pretty important building that was connected to Canada’s first Black labour union for the railway porters,” Laframboise explains. The Craig Block building was nearly lost and what surprised their students most was how little attention it received, and that the building tied to Black history held no heritage status.
The incident helped spark class conversations about missing histories. “If this was such an important piece of Canadian history that we didn’t know about and there is no plaque, and there is no recognition – what else are we missing?” McPhail says.
From there, Grade 10 students began researching local sites connected to Black history in Winnipeg’s Exchange District. The idea quickly became a school- wide project.
The students co-created lesson plans focused on six local stories – from slavery in the fur trade to Blackface in theatre, hotel segregation, and Black excellence in sports and politics. Other grades then expanded on the research and wrote scripts for a place-based walking tour, which includes sites such as Scots Monument, Burton Cummings Theatre, and Winnipeg City Hall where Deputy Mayor and Councillor Markus Chambers made history in 2018 as Winnipeg’s first Black city councillor.
To guide their work, students connected with community partners including Manitoba’s Black History Month Celebration Committee, Sport Manitoba, and the Black-Manitobans Chamber of Commerce.
The goal was to try to make genuine relationships and connections in a non extractive way. “Something we asked our kids was what do you see represented in our community? It’s that reflection on whose voices are present, why are those voices present? And whose voices are missing?” Laframboise says.
The project also revealed how fragile our shared history can be and how easily stories can be erased, especially when communities are destroyed or displaced. “There is very little information about the historic Black owned businesses and homes. When you lose the structure, that’s the beginning of losing the whole story,” McPhail explains.
Following the walking tour, students created a collaborative feather artwork symbolizing hope and collective commitment to remembering and honoring Black histories in our community.
Receiving the Governor General’s History Award was very humbling for the two teachers. “We were very honoured,” says Laframboise, adding that the recognition really belongs to the students. For McPhail, a highlight was meeting other educators and historians from across Canada and seeing work that was “empowering, passion filled, and hope filled, that didn’t shy away from the hard stuff.”
Laframboise and McPhail encourage other teachers to explore history with their students. “There’s guaranteed history around every neighborhood,” says Laframboise, adding the project is far from complete.
“We have tried to really emphasize that this isn’t just in the past. We still live within complex systems, and what are each of our roles within that? It’s messy and it’s not perfect, but it’s our job as teachers to help our students wrestle with our past, and our future.”
