More people now live in cities than ever before, and projections indicate that by 2050, 70% of human populations will reside in urban areas. High population density results in concentration of food, energy, water, and other resource consumption. Health implications of global megatrends, including the food–energy–water nexus, present palpable challenges. For example, 80% of the global sewage production is not treated; instead it is returned to the environment and thus reused for various purposes, including agriculture. Implications for water security, food safety, and international trade are not routinely examined. Such considerations are critical because when water security is compromised, antimicrobial resistance (a leading global health threat) can increase significantly and threaten food safety.

Due to the growing importance of these issues, Dr. Bryan W. Brooks, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Biomedical Studies and Director of Environmental Health Science at Baylor, and his students are actively engaging integrated environment and health research on six continents. Dr. Brooks and the students he mentors have been “flinging their green and gold afar” through international opportunities. For example, Dr. Brooks recently gave a plenary lecture on harmful algal blooms and participated in a panel discussion on antimicrobial resistance and mapping the antibiotics life cycle at the 3^rd International Conference on Environmental Pollution, Restoration, and Management in Quy Nhon, Vietnam. During this meeting, Dr. Brooks had the unique opportunity to meet with the Minister of the Vietnam Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and his senior staff, as well as faculty and administrators from several universities in Vietnam regarding future collaborations. Dr. Brooks also gave a lecture and visited colleagues at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, and engaged additional collaborators at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and University of Hong Kong.

Dr. Brooks is also spearheading the Global Horizon Scanning Project, which has identified dozens of timely interdisciplinary research needs related to environmental quality from around the globe using a “big questions” approach. Input solicited from thousands of scientists and engineers has been transparent, bottom-up, multidisciplinary, and multi-sector. Synthesis workshops, following big question solicitation from the scientific community, were held in Spain (for Europe), South Africa (for Africa), Argentina (for Latin America), New Zealand (for Oceania), Salt Lake City (for North America) and Singapore (for Asia). Each workshop was tri-chaired by experts from academia, government, and business. Key questions from these global workshops provide core materials for synthesis manuscripts, which are in various stages of peer-review or development. This project provides a first-of-its-kind global research agenda.

Through transdisciplinary engagement, both within Baylor as well as beyond – locally, nationally, and globally – Dr. Brooks and his colleagues seek to identify and address complex environment and health challenges that urgently require our attention.

Janette Carpenter to establish the Carpenter Embedded Global Classroom, Baylor University’s first fully funded study-abroad embedded classroom. Through the Carpenter Embedded Global Classroom, School of Education students will participate firsthand in comparative education experiences in locations around the globe at no additional charge to the student. As school districts throughout Texas and the United States increasingly seek teachers with a broad cultural competency, the Carpenter Embedded Classroom will empower students to meet those needs.

“The School of Education is grateful for this generous and insightful investment in the lives of Baylor students by the Carpenter family,” said Michael K. McLendon, dean of the School of Education. “Their decision to support this expansion of social, economic, and policy perspectives for Baylor students through cross-cultural learning serves to highlight the value of this family as a true partner of Baylor University in pursuing its mission of educating men and women for worldwide service.” Carpenter Global Classroom experiences will be designed and selected with a goal of empowering students with both an enhanced understanding of education in other countries and a broader perspective of the uniqueness of the American educational system.

This spring, the inaugural Carpenter Embedded Classroom experience took place March 4-12, 2017, in Queretaro, Mexico, as part of the School of Education’s semester-long “Social Issues in Education” class, taught by School of Education professor Dr. Tony Talbert. Baylor’s partner in Queretaro is Monterrey Tec University, one of the most prestigious universities in Latin America. The March trip represents the first of many such partnerships that will open other opportunities to Baylor students throughout the Americas and around the globe. “As a teacher, you are often put into environments where you are serving students from different cultural backgrounds, or who are impoverished and disadvantaged for reasons not of their own making,” Don Carpenter said. “We wanted to extend these opportunities to Baylor students, because in so doing, you build empathy. As an educator, you give students the tools they need to learn and develop to their full potential. Through experiences in global classrooms, Baylor students can develop understanding and empathy to help them as they teach and influence students of their own throughout their careers.”

Following an animated response from faculty and staff across the university, the Baylor Social Innovation Collaborative (BAY-SIC) is set to launch a diverse array of transdisciplinary projects that aim to discover and develop new ways of promoting hope and human flourishing. Because our most important problems are not reducible to any one discipline or field, and because we operate in a world in which challenges are less foreseeable and knowledge less reliable, embedded in many of these projects is an effort to design new models for collaborative teaching and learning across our 12 colleges and schools.

This fall we will launch five new “social innovation labs,” courses that promote a new way of doing business by assembling diverse groups of faculty, staff, and students to work together with community partners—both local and global—on wicked problems and generative solutions. Below are brief synopses of our first five “labs,” and additional information can be found on the BAY-SIC webpage. General questions about BAY-SIC and the social innovation labs can be directed to Andy Hogue, with questions about specific courses addressed to the contact person listed in each description.

Campus Hunger: Students, Systems, and Solutions

Despite the perceived affluence of higher education, a greater percentage of college students struggle to pay for food than in the general population. How might hunger affect the college experience, and what can be done about it? Through this course, students will begin to understand the complexities surrounding food and hunger in society and then explore their roles in higher education settings. Students will also design and carry out research-based responses to campus hunger.

For more information about this course, contact Dr. Nathan Alleman: nathan_alleman@baylor.edu

Child Migration in the Western Hemisphere

This social innovation lab explores the causes, characteristics, and consequences of the migration of children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras). The course aims to build collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams, which will examine particular aspects of the crisis and develop interventions to aid these migrants and prevent future child migration.

For more information about this course, contact Dr. Victor Hinojosa: victor_hinojosa@baylor.edu

Healthy River, Healthy Community

On a national and global scale, water is inextricably linked to critical social issues such as energy use, health and human development, poverty, food scarcity, and environmental degradation. Through this course, students will explore local water issues as a model for better understanding global water issues. Students will delve into the complexity of this growing global issue through first-hand experiences, including a river trip, field-based activities, and studying museum natural history collections.

For more information about this course, contact Dr. Suzanne Nesmith: suzanne_nesmith@baylor.edu

Combatting Human Trafficking

This course will involve the examination of contemporary human trafficking issues and modern day slavery through an interdisciplinary lens. Students will analyze systemic intersections that create the environments which perpetuate social inequalities, while also constructing innovative strategies that dismantle and disrupt systems of oppression.

For more information about this course, contact Dr. Elizabeth Goatley: elizabeth_goatley@baylor.edu

Social Innovation with At Risk Older Adults

At risk older persons fill the hidden corridors of Waco, and they live in the crucible of increasing economic, health care, and community service scarcity. This course aims to address impoverishment and isolation by working with vulnerable older persons in Waco and the surrounding area using interdisciplinary knowledge, research, and practice through engaging with local agencies and community partners.

For more information about this course, contact Dr. Dennis Myers: dennis_myers@baylor.edu

With the logistical, financial, and planning support of Baylor Missions, three faculty members took a unique team of engineering and social work students to Laredo, Texas during Spring Break. Professors Jill Klentzman and Brian Thomas from the School of Engineering and Computer Science as well as Professor Jennifer Dickey from the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work traveled to the small colonia community of Las Lomas outside of Laredo to support a church with its needs. Social work students collaborated with the community members, assessing for community strengths and priorities for change. They drafted an asset-based assessment for the Holding Institute, an agency that serves the needs of immigrants and Cubano refugees on the border. Building on their work in Las Lomas from July 2016, the engineering students worked towards developing two water wells to assist the church and community with its water access problems.

While their service activities during the day were discipline-specific, the evenings included cross-disciplinary discussions and activities to foster understanding and mutual respect between the diverse student groups. The plights, stories, and needs of forced migrants were explored from the dual lenses of social services and infrastructure. Professor Thomas reported, “The opportunity to work together on a real project that benefits real people has helped some students confirm in their own minds that engineering is what they want to do with their lives. For others, the main benefit was experiencing close community with our engineering team and the social work team, as well as developing relationships with the community members and the faculty. When faculty members get to be practitioners alongside students, a whole new type of learning occurs.” A Baylor freshman, Ben Phillips, was enthusiastic about his experience in Las Lomas: “I think this week was one of the best weeks of my life. I felt like I was able to contribute to the project and actually impact people’s lives through the work done. I would love to do this kind of work for the rest of my life. There are ways God has blessed me (time, finance, knowledge, skills) that I can use to improve other people’s lives, and I feel so blessed through giving.”