Fifteen Years of Peace Engineering : Models of Integration into the Senior-Design Engineering Educational Capstone Experience

Programming in the field of Peace Engineering has been a part of the fabric of our work at the University of St. Thomas for over 15 years. A Peace Engineering minor is manifested in an appropriate two semester senior design project that partners with universities, non-profits, and NGO's in the U.S. and across the world. When coupled with a service learning abroad to collaborate in-person with a global community partner, these projects have been very impactful. Our work in this area is driven by our institutional principles of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) including social justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, sustainability, and the dignity of work. The paper will provide a summary of our 15 years of experience of success and failure in growing this core element of our engineering educational experience. We examine three models of credit-bearing student-community engagement: faculty-guided projects, collaborations with credit bearing study-abroad providers, and collaborations with onsite non-profit organizations that do not grant university credit. We conclude with our strategic objectives going forward including expansion of faculty involvement and development of specific curricular elements to support this effort.