President’s Award Project Inspires Campus Healing Space Improvements
- Dec 3, 2024
- Education Abroad
Fifteen students from The University of Texas at Austin recently returned to the Forty Acres from Northern Ireland, where they had traveled as part of “Leading with Peace: Lessons from Northern Ireland,” one of four projects funded by the President’s Award for Global Learning 2023-2024.
Each year, the President’s Award for Global Learning sends Longhorns across the world to engage with international partners and address global issues. With guidance from supervising faculty, participating students spend three semesters working on a focused area of study as part of an interdisciplinary team.
This group traveled to Northern Ireland to explore the legacy of The Troubles, a violent, 30-year conflict between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists that ended in 1998. Supervising faculty Bruce Kellison, Noël Busch-Armendariz and Monica Martinez intended for the project to help the students “understand the pervasiveness, impact and barriers created by conflict and violence, and the usefulness of peacemaking and restorative justice practices.”
To gain deeper insight into the reconciliation process, the group visited Northern Ireland’s iconic peace walls. The walls were originally built from corrugated metal and barbed wire to keep the peace by separating Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. Now built with more permanent materials, they stand covered with graffiti and murals.
The students also learned about the conflict’s status today and Northern Ireland’s dedicated spaces for healing and recovery in response to the conflict, such as constructing a mall out of glass — a building material previously avoided by contractors due to repeated bomb threats.
Each of the four President's Award teams worked on its own specialized project. One team of senior students, Anika Bhatia, Kate Whyte, Kena Desai and Trishta Nguyen, chose “trauma-informed design.”
Bhatia explained “trauma-informed design” as creating safe spaces for people who have endured trauma, using colors, open spaces, natural light, windows, and greenery to encourage healing.
“There are ways that conflict still looms,” said Whyte of the area’s legacy. “But there are other ways that Northern Ireland has really responded through design with spaces for healing and recovery.”
The team initially set out to create a toolkit of trauma-informed elements that hospitals and clinics could use to enhance healing. But soon, their focus shifted to addressing burnout and mental health on college campuses.
“Our research shows that trauma can lead to poor work performance, absenteeism, tardiness,” Nguyen explained. “We found that trauma-informed design principles not only reduce stress and burnout, but also enhance productivity.”
Now back on the Forty Acres, the students have continued their work on the President’s Award project, using their knowledge of trauma-informed design. They are creating a design toolkit and a list of recommendations for improvements to the four MindBody Labs scattered across campus. The labs are windowless rooms, outfitted with comfy chairs, that offer audio and video lessons on a variety of mental health practices like deep breathing and meditation.
Suspecting that most students on campus don’t even know the MindBody Labs exist, the team began working to measure and increase awareness by launching a campuswide survey. Next, they compiled suggestions for achievable improvements to the spaces, such as different paint colors, lighting adjustments, playlists, perhaps even a menu of scents — all designed to engage the five senses and ease the nervous system.
Emphasizing the connection between trauma-informed design, healing and productivity, the students’ passion for this project is palpable. Even after the project wraps up in December 2024, they hope to work with the Counseling and Mental Health Center to gauge whether MindBody Labs are improving students’ performance in classes and experiences in their day-to-day lives.
Ultimately, the team hopes that by introducing UT students to thoughtfully designed healing spaces, their fellow Longhorns will begin to seek out, and even create, those sorts of spaces as they enter the workforce and carry out their adult lives.
Learn more about the President’s Award for Global Learning at Texas Global.
