Caroline Baillie

Today, the center serves as a base for group and individual lab work, entrepreneurial opportunities, and professional development. Some 40 breakout rooms are available exclusively to students, an environment that encourages teamwork. "Gone are the days of worrying about students copying off each other," says Baillie, "If students can help each other, that's great." Indeed, nearly everything in the facility, from the security to conferences to the eco-friendly tea room, is student-run.

The center also sponsors a weeklong intensive program in which groups of 20 students consider the ethical and environmental impact of various projects. Baillie developed this "professional skills course" to provide students from all engineering disciplines a taste of real-world engagement. In one scenario, for example, students role-play a court case to determine who bears responsibility when a child dies using a lawnmower that has been adjusted by his grandparents.

ALTERNATIVE TO LECTURES

ASIDE FROM TEACHING a course in engineering and social justice and two graduate-level courses in engineering education, Baillie seeks ways to encourage innovative teaching methods among other faculty members, many of whom don't have a background in education scholarship. "You can't just build a building and expect the faculty to know anything other than lecture-based teaching."

Ultimately, she wants students to be assessed in areas like writing or ethics within engineering classes. "That's real integration, rather than just a course plopped in their curriculum," she argues. "I think we make a mistake by separating the disciplines. We have people with these specialties, but real problems are interdisciplinary."

Queen's has also helped Baillie's work in the developing world. She received a $20,000 award from the university's applied science faculty in 2005 for her Lesotho research. That project investigated ways to turn locally available agricultural fibers, like agave, and recycled plastic into roofing materials.

But the worlds of engineering education and Baillie's brand of social activism do not coexist easily.

"It's popular within universities to work on things which bring in a lot of funding-not ones which take up your time but don't have huge publication output or funding input," she says. "Part of what I'm interested in doing is trying to help make this kind of work mainstream ... good for young faculty to do and still get tenure and promotion."

"We are trying to make changes so that there are fewer differences between the rich and poor," she continues. "Some people would worry about their own lives changing for the worse to accommodate this. That's what makes some of the work unpopular."

When she can't get outside funding, as was the case with Wastefor-Life, Baillie substitutes collaboration. In Buenos Aires, she and Feinblatt worked with nine cooperatives, faculty from the University of Buenos Aires, the Swiss nongovernment organization Avina, a micro-credit agency, and scientists from Argentina's National Institute of Industrial Technology (INTI). Each of these partners has helped move the project forward, with members from INTI working with cartonero groups to teach them how to better separate and classify trash, for example.