With Lessons Learned in Northern Ireland, Students Aim to Improve Healing Spaces on UT Campus
Each year, the President’s Award for Global Learning, administered by Texas Global, sends UT students out into the world to engage with international partners and address global issues. With guidance from supervising faculty, participating students spend three semesters (spring/summer/fall) working on a focused area of study as part of an interdisciplinary team.
Leading with Peace / Designing for Healing
In 2024, the President’s Award for Global Learning funded four initiatives — one of these was “Leading with Peace: Lessons from Northern Ireland.” The initiative sent students abroad to understand the reconciliation process, using the historical conflict of “the Troubles” as an example. Supervising faculty Bruce Kellison, Noël Busch-Armendariz and Monica Martinez envisioned “Leading with Peace” as a way to help students “understand the pervasiveness, impact, and barriers created by conflict and violence and the usefulness of peacemaking and restorative justice practices.”
Fifteen students (four project teams) participated in the Leading with Peace initiative. One team — Anika Bhatia, Kate Whyte, Kena Desai, and Trishta Nguyen (all seniors) — chose “trauma-informed design” as their focus. What is trauma-informed design? Anika provided a basic definition:
“It’s making a space for people who have a history of trauma. Using colors to make them feel safe, creating open spaces, using natural light, windows, greenery — making a space that allows people to heal.”
For their project (a capstone project, of sorts), the team initially set out to create a toolkit of trauma-informed design elements that could be used by hospitals and clinics; over time, however, they shifted their focus to creating that same toolkit for student spaces on the UT campus.
Kate explained, “Our main focus now is students experiencing burnout and don’t really have a space to process the work they are doing and to promote healthy, productive habits. We want to install principles of trauma-informed design in healing places on campus.”
Trish added, “We really want our project to uplift and promote the mental health of students.”
Read the full article on the IC2 website.
