Hello Dr. Debra Kouda 👋🎉

After 4 years, I finally made it through the process of earning a Doctorate of Education in Leadership and Innovation from Arizona State University!

Hooray!

You better believe that when my dissertation was uploaded into ProQuest to be published I felt like this!

One of the major highlights of my research dissertation, Transformative Learning through Virtual Tourism: Exploring West Africa in the Digital Space, was the importance of reflection as a mechanism for change. This is exactly what I have been doing for the last few weeks since finishing this momentous undertaking. Reflecting. And I thought I would share some of those reflections with you - aren’t you lucky!

(Note: this reflection ended up being much longer than I anticipated. But that is what the whole point of reflection is, isn’t it? I wrote about where my thoughts took me. If it seems like a lot to read, I encourage you to push play on the audio version above!)

We might as well start at the beginning. Throughout the four years and even more now, people have been curious as to why I pursued a doctoral degree in the first place.

I can provide this answer to you firsthand with my voice from four years ago when we had to introduce ourselves via a short video in one of the first graduate courses. This was the prompt:

Post a 2- to 3- minute video in the discussion board

Include the following:

* Give your name, current position and the topic of interest that you have been developing.

* Tell us one interesting fact about yourself that will help everyone learn about and remember you.

* Identify one thing you hope to gain in the class. Be specific about areas where you would like to improve your research skills (i.e., strategies for reading, writing, organizing, integrating research.)

And here was my response - it will take 2 minutes of your time:

If you did not feel like watching the video, here is a brief synopsis. My pie-in-the-sky goal was to completely overhaul the education system in Benin, and one of the first milestones I set for myself was to create a center for innovation, research, and practice. However, I realized that I lacked the theory, research, and leadership skills necessary to pull this off in a sustainable way. My initial curiosities were around the indigenous knowledge and history of education in Benin before colonialism. Looking back, I think a lot of this goal centered on wanting to create more jobs and economic development within the region that we call home in Benin. This is something to remember as you keep reading.

Side note here: My intro video intrigued a couple of my classmates in my cohort, and they tried to reach out to learn more. I ignored those initial emails. Did not even respond. However, I eventually realized that was a bit rude, and the single best thing that I did during the last four years was attend a Zoom call at the beginning of my second semester put together by those colleagues whom I had ghosted previously. That first call led to a second and then our little group, known as the Goldilocks Community of Practice, met twice a week for the rest of the four years. This all happened organically. It was not required by the program. But it was with this group of people that I learned more than in any of the courses. We worked on assignments together, had discussions about tough topics, helped each other through amazing and difficult times with our research, and so much more that words just can’t encapsulate. As I wrote in my dissertation acknowledgments, they made me a better person, researcher, leader, and innovator. If you are thinking about doing a doctoral program, especially one that is entirely done online, I could not recommend finding a group of people to go through it with together. It changes absolutely everything.

I also should mention that I am mainly focusing on my dissertation here, but along with this, I took two to three graduate-level courses each semester, including summer, for the last four years.

Within the doctoral program, we went through 3 cycles of action research. The beauty of action research as a methodology is that it is cyclical and involves ongoing iterations to find solutions and address practical problems. Action research is also rooted in its context, which makes it perfect for education. As you will see from my research questions in the first two cycles, I was primarily trying to remain in the vein of the initial purpose of my doctoral studies. I’m sure you would be very interested in seeing the results from the data, however, I’m just going to highlight the RQs.

Cycle 0 (Spring 2022)

Problem of Practice: My problem of practice is concerned with improving education in Benin by drawing upon the Indigenous education frameworks of the 42 ethnic groups who have served as the foundation of The Republic of Benin.

Purpose of the Study:

From the knowledge extracted from a previous set of interviews, I will create a series of virtual professional development workshops for teachers including,

* how to incorporate Indigenous frameworks into their teaching practices;

* how teachers can use reflection to enhance their use of Indigenous teaching frameworks in their classrooms.

Research Questions

The following research questions will guide the conduct of the study.

RQ 1: How and to what extent does implementation of “Project Indigenous Teaching Frameworks” affect teacher participants’ perceptions of their (a) knowledge about and (b) skills for implementing Indigenous teaching practices with their students?

RQ 2: How and to what extent does implementation of “Project Indigenous Teaching Frameworks” affect teacher participants’ perceptions of their (a) attitudes about and (b) self-efficacy for implementing Indigenous teaching practices with their students?

Cycle 1 (Fall 2022)

For this cycle of research, it would have been ideal for me to travel to Benin, however, it was not possible. So I had to make a few changes and look at my questions differently to try and gather some new data that would still have an impact on my problem of practice from Cycle 0.

Research Questions

RQ 1: How does a Participatory Action Research approach during an onboarding process influence the knowledge gathering of indigenous teaching methods?

RQ 2: How does the development of a Community of Practice (CoP) affect the decisions and self-efficacy of the participants to incorporate their indigenous teaching methods to enhance the solutions of community-based problems?

Spring of 2023 brought about our placements into a Learning Scholar Community (LSC), which grouped four or five of us with a professor mentor who would become the chair of our dissertation committee and work with us to get our dissertation finished. Due to some coercing from our little Community of Practice, for the first time in the history of the program, we - as doctoral students - had input into who we wanted to be in an LSC with. I have to say, we were pretty proud of this little achievement. We were a teeny bit rebellious in this group, at least, that is what we thought the rumors might have been around the in-person staff. Anyhow, this is the semester that I was introduced to my mentor and we started working toward putting together my doctoral proposal.

Now, throughout this time, I had been trying to get the educational center, which I had decided to call Ékodjayé off the ground. There had been a couple of investor pitches that I had made as well as speaking with numerous other folks who had begun non-profits. A colleague of mine in the program set me up to speak with one of his friends who had been an investor for many years, just to see if there were any tips or suggestions that I could glean from his knowledge. I explained to him the purpose of the educational center and my why behind doing it (economic development with our community in Benin), and he asked one very important question which I still have engrained in my memory…When people finish with your educational programs, will they have a job waiting for them?

The question stopped me cold. The answer was no. I had not thought that far. But you know the saying, when one door closes…and I started to think of ideas that would include the important element of a job. And then it hit me. Tourism. Although my husband and I started a tourism company in February 2020, it had a tough time getting wings due to the pandemic. What if we were to rebrand and start over? Now the question of how could I incorporate this into my doctoral research began percolating.

Over the years, I have taken trips abroad that have led me to some pretty incredible transformational experiences, working with cheetahs in Namibia and volunteering in Peace Corps to name a few. The hardest part for me always was coming back “home”, surrounded by friends and family who did not understand the experience I had just had or why my perspectives and worldviews had changed. I believe this is fairly common with returned Peace Corps volunteers, and after my service was up, I stayed in contact with fellow volunteers just to have the support to return to the “normal” world. And there was always some part of me that was curious as to how I could help those at “home” understand. In a way, it is somewhat selfish, because I wanted to expand my community on who I could talk to about those experiences and for them to have somewhat of an idea about what I was talking about and why my views were the way they were.

In May of 2023, I broached the idea to my mentor that I was seriously thinking about changing my dissertation topic. Not only did my original problem of practice not solve a problem that I was keen on h