The Learning Lens is a series within Between Here and Benin, published every other Thursday. It's where I think out loud about transformative learning theory — what it is, why it matters, and how it shapes everything I'm building with Hello West Africa. No PhD required. Just curiosity.

This week, I came across a post from a travel professional I follow on LinkedIn. He was pushing back on the word “transformative” in travel, and I appreciated the perspective.

His argument went something like this: most people don’t want a trip that changes their life. They want a break. Time with their family. Something different. And the change that does happen is subtle; it comes from seeing the world from a new angle, from demystifying what felt strange, from realizing there is more that unites us than divides us across the globe.

He described a family he had taken on a two-month trip through Ecuador, the Galápagos, and Colombia. Volcanoes, the Amazon, and some of the most spectacular places on the planet. They came home with inside jokes, stories to recount, two months of family time, and horizons that had forever shifted.

A trip of a lifetime, he said. But transformational? Life-changing? That’s a bit hyperbolic. Their kids went back to school. They went back to work.

He ended with this: “I can’t change lives, but I can certainly enrich them.”

I read it twice. And I thought, he’s right about how subtle the shift can be. But I think he stopped one step short.

How I Got Here

I want to talk a little about how I discovered transformative learning theory and why I started looking into it in the first place.

I wanted to provide people with an experience similar to what I had during my Peace Corps service, where I returned home with a changed perspective. I knew something had shifted in me. I just didn’t have the language for it yet. I had the opportunity to start exploring what this was when I began working on my dissertation proposal for my doctorate.

Learning is often thought of as taking place in a classroom. You can ask your kids, “Hey, what did you learn today?” and they’ll tell you about fractions or the American Revolution. But I have come to believe that learning happens in many more places than just the four walls of a classroom or a specific formal educational experience.

I started diving into the relationship between learning and travel. What I found was that much research on tourism highlights it as an incredible learning experience, often described as informal because it occurs outside the traditional educational environment. However, much of the research primarily focuses on customer satisfaction, financial aspects, and the educational components of tourism. Researchers have encouraged others to look beyond educational tourism specifically and explore how and why tourism facilitates learning more broadly.

That’s when I came across Jack Mezirow and his transformative learning theory.

For a grounding definition, Van Winkle and Legge describe learning during tourism this way:

Learning during tourism is an engaging process of exploring oneself, relationships, other people, cultures, and places. Reflection on the self, relationships, past experiences, and differences between one’s own experience and the experiences of others forms the basis of a learning experience that allows people to confirm or disconfirm preexisting knowledge by freely engaging in activities with people in spaces outside their usual environment.

Read that slowly. That is travel. That is what travel can do…when it’s designed correctly.

What Transformative Actually Means

Here is the definition I keep coming back to, from Jack Mezirow:

Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mind-sets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.

Let me repeat the key part: our taken-for-granted frames of reference.

Not our entire worldview. Not our personality. Not our life’s direction. Our frames of reference, the invisible lenses we use to make sense of everything around us, are becoming more open, more reflective, more capable of change.

So what exactly is a frame of reference? Mezirow breaks it into two things: habits of mind and points of view.

A habit of mind is a set of assumptions that acts as a filter, the proverbial glasses you wear to interpret everything that happens to you. These form early, shaped by culture, family, language, religion, and experience. They show up in how you think about social norms, in your moral instincts, in your sense of self, and in your emotional response patterns. Most of the time, you don’t even know they’re there. They’re just how the world looks.

A point of view is how that habit of mind gets expressed in a specific situation. And here’s the interesting part: unlike a habit of mind, you can actually try on someone else’s point of view to see how it fits. That’s the entry point. That’s where travel starts to do its work.

So when I talk about frames of reference shifting, that’s what I mean. Not your whole personality. Not your entire belief system. One habit of mind, examined. One point of view, tried on. One assumption, quietly questioned.

That family came home with horizons that had forever shifted. That travel professional’s own words.

Horizons that have forever shifted are frames of reference that have changed.

That IS transformative learning. Not hyperbole. Not fireworks. Subtle, quiet, exactly as he described, and still a transformation.

The distinction matters because if we decide that transformation requires something dramatic, we miss all the ways it is actually happening. We dismiss it. We stop supporting it. And that is where things fall apart.

Because here is what the research shows: the process of transformation does not just occur during the trip. It is what happens after. And without support, it fades. You go back across the bridge you thought you were ready to cross. Much safer back on the other side.

Transformation Is Just Learning

I want to say something that might sound simple, but gets lost in all the breathless language around transformative travel:

Transformation is learning.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

We tend to compare transformation to a butterfly and its metamorphosis, the coming out of the cocoon as something entirely new. It’s a beautiful image. But here’s the thing about the butterfly: it’s just doing what comes naturally. It has no choice in the matter. It doesn’t have to decide to become something new. It doesn’t have to reflect on what it’s leaving behind.

Human transformation is different. It is a specific kind of learning, the kind that involves taking your taken-for-granted frames of reference, your habits of mind, your assumptions about how the world works, and revising them in light of something new.

But it is learning. Not magic. Not a mystical event that happens to you on a mountaintop or a beach in West Africa.

And like all learning, it takes time. It happens in ordinary moments. It shows up in the small decisions you make after you get home, not in the grand feelings you have while you’re away.

The Cornfield

Let me give you a real example.

I was in my second year of Peace Corps service in Benin, sitting outside reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It’s a book about food, specifically about how corn has infiltrated nearly every product we consume in the United States, and how disconnected most Americans are from where their food actually comes from.

I was reading this book, sitting not 100 feet from a cornfield.

The corn had been planted by people in the village of Camate. It would be harvested, ground into flour, and made into la pâte, a staple food that fed families in the community where I was living. I could see it from where I was sitting.

That was a disorienting dilemma. The first phase of Mezirow’s ten phases, the spark, the crack in the lens. In that moment, everything I had assumed about food, about where it comes from, about the gap between American grocery stores and the actual ground, became suddenly, uncomfortably visible.

But the transformation didn’t happen in that moment.

It happened when I came home.

Back in the United States, standing in a supermarket aisle, I started reading labels. I started avoiding processed foods. I sought out farmers’ markets. I made different choices, small ones, consistently, because something had shifted in how I understood the relationship between food and the people who grow it.

The disorienting dilemma happened in Benin. The transformation happened in an American grocery store, months later, quietly, far away from the village cornfields.

That is what transformed frames of reference look like in real life. Subtle. Ordinary. And completely real.

The Baby

A second example comes from my time in Benin, where children are everywhere.

Babies are often carried on their mothers’ backs during funerals, weddings, and important family events, from morning until night. Even in noisy environments, the babies sleep, close and warm and held. Not only that, but they also sleep with their mother. Not in a crib next to the bed, or in a separate bedroom down the hall. Nestled right in next to the food source and her beating heart.

This was a disorienting dilemma for me. I had always believed that babies should sleep in a separate room, in a crib. Observing this practice every day made me question my assumptions and frames of reference, quietly, without drama, just a slow accumulating question I didn’t quite know what to do with.

So I filed it away. Came home. Moved on.

And then in 2014, five years after my Peace Corps service ended, I had my first child.

I tried the crib. I did what I had always assumed you were supposed to do. And neither of us slept.

And then I remembered Benin. I tried something different.

I put my little guy next to me in bed.

He slept. I slept. No need to get out of bed to nurse him back to sleep. Just a little blip in my dreams.

Five years. That’s how long it took for a disorienting dilemma experienced in Benin to complete its journey and arrive as a changed behavior in my real life. That’s not a trip of a lifetime moment. That’s transformation. Quiet, delayed, ordinary, and real.

And that travel professional was right: it didn’t change my life. It changed one small thing about how I lived it. But that small thing? That’s a frame of reference that shifted. That’s transformative learning. Even five years later. Even quietly. Even without anyone calling it that at the time.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Both of those examples have something in common: the transformation happened after. Not during the experience. After.

Mezirow’s research is clear on this. The later phases of transformative learning, the ones that determine whether a shift actually lasts, happen when you return to your regular life and try to integrate what you encountered. That family in Ecuador came home with their horizons shifted. What happens next? Do those shifted horizons show up in how they make decisions, how they talk to their kids, and what they prioritize? Or do they slowly fade back into the comfortable familiar?

That depends on whether the shift is supported.

One of the most important tools throughout the entire process is reflection. Journaling, whether in video, voice, or writing, is one of the most critical elements in this process. So are conversations with others: fellow travelers who shared the experience, people who ask the right questions when you get home, a community you can return to when you encounter a barrier or an assumption you don’t know how to work through on your own. It keeps the disorienting dilemma alive long enough for the transformation to complete itself. It creates the space for the shift to land.

What This Means for Hello West Africa

When I say Hello West Africa is designed around transformative learning theory, this is what I mean.

I am not promising that you will have a life-changing moment while you are in Benin. You might. But that is not the point.

The point is that we are designing for what happens after.

The tour begins two to three months before you even arrive, with activities designed to prepare your frames of reference for what you will encounter. We want you to arrive already curious, already questioning, already open to the disorienting dilemma that Benin will inevitably provide.

And then we stay connected after you leave. Because that is where the subtle magic happens. Not in the moment of eating la pâte for the first time, or hearing a drum circle at night, or walking down to the Port of No Return. In those moments, you are experiencing the disorienting dilemma. The transformation comes later, in the ordinary moments of your regular life, when something you encountered in Benin suddenly makes sense of something you see at home.

We want to be there for that part too.

That travel professional said he can’t change lives, but he can enrich them. I respect that. But I think enrichment and transformation are not as far apart as they seem. When horizons shift forever, even subtly or slowly, frames of reference change.

That’s transformation. And it deserves support all the way through.

One Thing to Sit With

Think about a time when something you experienced while traveling, or during any significant life change, didn’t fully land until much later. Not the moment of the experience. The moment it changed something small in your daily life.

That quiet moment of change? That’s transformation. It was always happening. You just didn’t have a name for it yet.

Hit reply and tell me yours, I’m curious!

Until next Thursday,

P.S. — The Omnivore’s Dilemma is still one of the books I recommend most. If you haven’t read it, add it to your list. Maybe you can read it while you are visiting me in Benin, sitting next to a corn field! The disorienting dilemma hits differently that way.

Last Friday, a conversation on LinkedIn led to this question:

“Why are you doing this?”

They meant Hello West Africa. And I thought, I know this answer. I’ve said it a hundred times. But when I sat down to actually write it out, something different happened. The answer didn’t come out as a mission statement or an elevator pitch.

It came out as a list.

I want people to pull peanuts out of the ground.

I want people to feel the rush of humidity when they step off the plane.

I want people to be a part of the din on the bus ride from the airport terminal to the plane, because then you know you are on the right plane headed to Africa.

I want them to taste my mother-in-law’s incredible cooking and eat with their hands.

I want people to rest on a full bag of unshelled peanuts under the stars.

I want people to experience walking through the village and greeting everyone (which can sometimes be over twenty times!).

I want people to feel uncomfortable.

I want people to experience what it is like to not understand the language.

I want people to see children running around, healthy and clean, and yes, also dirty, because children play outside and there is lots of dirt.

I want people to drink an herbal tea made by my mother-in-law that would surely clear any cold they might have.

I want people to hear the sound of sweeping in the early morning.

I want people to buy incredible food for less than a dollar from a stand on the side of the road.

I want people to feel the rhythm of a drum circle at night.

I want people to taste the dry sweetness of cashew apple juice.

I want people to have a shot of sodabi at 9 AM.

I want people to return to where they came from and tell others all about Benin.

I want people to know where it is and show others on a map.

That’s not a hundred reasons. But I could keep going. Because there are endless experiences I would love for people to have when they are with us in Benin.

A Little Background on Hello West Africa

I realized this week, after that LinkedIn message, that I keep assuming people know what Hello West Africa is. They don’t. And that’s on me to keep explaining.

So. For anyone new here, and for anyone who could use a reminder:

Hello West Africa is a boutique cultural immersion travel company that my husband, D’Aquin, and I are building on our property in Benin, West Africa. Not a resort. Not a safari. Not a tour that shows you Africa from a comfortable distance.

Living in a village. Our village. At our home.

The flagship 12-day experience starts in Cotonou, the economic capital, where you acclimate to the heat, feel the humidity, and get your first taste of what it means to be there. From there, we drive two and a half hours north to Kabole, where our house sits and where we will spend most of our time exploring the area. Walking through the village, exploring the third largest open-air market in the country, eating meals prepared by my mother-in-law, and living alongside a community that has been our home for fifteen years.

At the end, we drive south to Ouidah, the birthplace of Vodun and the location of the Port of No Return, one of the most significant sites on the slave route. It is a heavy and important place. We save it for the end, before heading back to Cotonou and the airport.

We want to offer the only professionally guided, fully English-language immersive cultural tour of Benin. Designed for curious travelers who want to understand the world, not just see it.

That’s Hello West Africa. In a nutshell.

What Really Happened Last Week

Last Tuesday, I drove to Seattle to see Dr. Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, for whom I interned in Namibia in 2003. I wrote about that expected trip last week, but what I didn’t fully capture was what it felt like to be in that room.

It was incredible to see Laurie again. I am amazed at what she has built since 2003 — the organization has brought cheetahs back to India and now to Somaliland, continues working in Kenya and Namibia, and raises livestock-guarding dogs to give to farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by cheetah conflict. Watching her speak and interact with people reminded me of something important: she was one of the first women I ever watched trying to grow and change something. To make a real difference in this world. For people and the wildlife they cohabitate with.

That must have had more of an impact on me than I realized at the time.

I also met Jake Haupert from the Transformative Tourism Council, whom I learned about while researching transformative tourism for my doctorate. I had been wanting to meet him in person for a long time, and we finally did. His organization, Explorers X, was hosting Laurie for the event. During our conversation, Jake encouraged me to share what I was doing, which gave me the opportunity to tell the Hello West Africa story to people who didn’t know me.

And something shifted.

Someone in that room listened to the story and said: it sounds like a love story.

A love story between D’Aquin and me. A love story about a country. A love story about wanting to share that country with others.

I had never thought about it that way. But they were right. It is.

I also met Jungle Jordan, a zookeeper turned wildlife content creator, and we ended up talking about mutual acquaintances from my days working in zoos over 20 years ago. The world is small in the most wonderful ways.

But the thing that stayed with me most was this: standing in that room, telling strangers about Hello West Africa, watching people listen and then ask for more — it made the whole thing feel real in a way that newsletters and business plans and spreadsheets hadn’t quite managed to do.

It also helped me move past a moment in 2018 when I shared the idea of this tourism company with someone who laughed and said it would never work.

That moment has less power over me now. A little less, every week.

What’s Coming Next

Today I have a call with a woman who has been in the travel industry for a long time and is part of a group that leads women travel leaders. I met her at the Seattle event. I am curious to see where this conversation takes me!

I am also working on getting more organized this week, building out a system in Notion that I will actually use rather than just explore. I have a tendency to fall in love with the app and forget to use it as a tool. Working on that.

On the side, I do website design, and I’m helping a friend update his website this week. It’s a nice change of pace from business plans and pitch decks, a different kind of building, same attention to detail.

LinkedIn and Instagram posting continues. The Learning Lens goes out this Thursday.

And I am saying this out loud, publicly, so that you can hold me to it:

My goal is to host the first Hello West Africa tour by December 2026. Christmas in Benin.

For that to happen, I need to find people who believe in this dream enough to help make it real. If that is you, or if you know someone it might be, please reach out. Reply to this email, find me on LinkedIn, and find me on Instagram. Let’s talk.

What I’m Learning

Building in public is working, but not in the way I expected.

I expected the newsletter to grow my subscriber list. It is, slowly. What I did not expect was that it would make Hello West Africa feel real to me. That standing in a room in Seattle telling the story out loud would feel like a continuation of what I’ve been writing here every Tuesday. That someone would hear the story and call it a love story. That I would come home and sit down and write that list and realize: I know exactly why I am doing this. I have always known.

And it is completely normal to feel frightened and excited about it all. A little throwback to last week’s post.

In My Free Time

It was Easter this past weekend, and I love putting together scavenger hunts for my boys. This year, there were eight clues, including a trip half a block down to the mailbox and out into the yard, places they had never had to go for a clue before. Watching their brains turn as they worked through each one was one of my favorite things I have done all year. My oldest declared it the best scavenger hunt ever. That is all the feedback I need.

Oh, and I made an incredible spring salad!

We also dyed Easter eggs. I didn’t wake up early enough on the day we were to hard-boil the eggs, and my middle son Benjamin decided to do it himself. He looked up how, but the timing was a little off — the first twelve eggs came out softer than intended in the middle. We made a second batch and got it right. Fail and learn! The eggs turned out to be the most beautiful reds, pinks, and blues. One of my favorite activities.

The weather has turned here in Washington. Spring is actually arriving. I am working on getting back into running. I ran a half-marathon in 2019, and I’m not sure I want to train for that again, but I want to be able to run three miles easily three or four times a week. The beginning is always the hardest. I just have to keep going and remind myself that I can do it. Movement is the medicine I need right now.

The Psychology of Money is almost finished. Highly recommend, especially if you are building something and thinking carefully about what money is actually for. I picked up a few more at the library last week. I can never have enough books.

Thank you so much for being here! Every week you show up and read this, you are part of what makes Hello West Africa feel possible.

I’ll see you Thursday for the Learning Lens. And next Tuesday, for whatever happens between now and then.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — Hello West Africa is looking for aligned investors and Founding Supporters. If you want to be part of building this before the doors open, reply to this email and let’s talk.

It was 2003. I was 21, sitting in my uncle’s car on the way to JFK, and Norah Jones was playing.

Come away with me in the night…

I was about to board a plane to Namibia, in Southern Africa, for a three-month internship with the Cheetah Conservation Fund. I had fundraised my way there. My dad had helped me buy the ticket from a travel agency, one you actually had to walk into. I didn’t have a cell phone. The internet existed, but just barely.

I remember standing at a payphone inside JFK, calling my parents before I boarded. I was scared and excited and crying all at once, the way you cry when something is both wonderful and terrifying in equal measure. I didn’t know when I would talk to them next.

As it turned out. Once. In three months.

To this day, every time I hear Norah Jones sing that song, I am back at that payphone. Twenty-one years old, about to go somewhere that would quietly begin to change everything.

Where Hello West Africa Really Comes From

I want to tell you something about Hello West Africa that doesn’t appear in the business plan.

The design of this company, the philosophy behind it, the way it’s structured, what it prioritizes and why, didn’t come from a classroom or a textbook. It came from experiences. Specific ones. The kind that leaves a mark so quietly you don’t realize it until years later, when you look back and think: oh. That’s where that started.

It started in Namibia.

I arrived at the Cheetah Conservation Fund for the first time at night. My job as the passenger was to watch for wildlife crossing the road. At any moment, a giraffe or kudu could have appeared in the headlights. I certainly wasn’t in Kansas anymore, although in Alaska, moose could cross the road. Before going to bed, I looked up and saw the Southern Cross.

The next morning, I saw the place with wide and curious eyes. CCF’s headquarters sits on a 142,000-acre reserve adjacent to the Waterberg Plateau Park in central Namibia, a full-scale research and education facility with thatched-roof buildings that caught the morning light in a way I still remember. It is a remarkable operation, built from the ground up by Dr. Laurie Marker, whose words I only recently rediscovered:

“We always think there is someone else who will do something, that ‘they’ will take care of it. I realized early in my work that there is no ‘they,’ and so I decided that I would take action.”

I had no idea how much that sentence would eventually mean to me.

(There were also giant flat spiders on the bathroom walls. Now that’s something I had to get used to...couldn’t scream and run away every time I saw one!)

I worked with cheetahs. I went for runs after work and got warned to watch out for oryx, baboons, and warthogs on the path. I learned from people who had dedicated their lives to conservation. It was everything I had hoped for.

And yet. There was a nagging feeling I couldn’t quite name.

The Namibian staff who worked at CCF lived with their families nearby, but I was never invited over. I wanted to see what a traditional Namibian home looked like. I was curious about their lives and their culture. (One of the young Namibian interns mentioned missing sour milk once, and I found myself thinking, who would want to drink sour milk?) But there was an invisible line between the visitors’ world and theirs, and I didn’t know how to cross it. I’m not even sure, looking back, whether I could have asked.

I filed it away as a nagging feeling I couldn’t name yet. And I moved on.

Then something else happened that planted a second seed.

Two Peace Corps volunteers had recently transferred to CCF from a village posting elsewhere in Namibia. They had spent their service helping build a library for the community. They had poured time, funding, and effort into it. And then the library sat unused. The volunteers couldn’t understand why no one was coming. They felt like none of their work was appreciated. (I’m sure there were other issues. That was over 20 years ago, and memory is imperfect.)

I was 21. I didn’t say anything out loud. But a question formed quietly in the back of my mind:

Did the community even want a library in the first place?

Fast forward four years. The Peace Corps idea had been circling for a while, surfacing when I was working with cheetahs again in White Oak, Florida, and again when I moved to Seattle and was working at Starbucks. I finally submitted my application. They said: Congratulations, you’re going to Benin!

I had to find Benin on the world map.

I took French lessons. I checked the CIA World Factbook. I learned that Benin had two national parks in the north with safari-style wildlife. I thought, given my background, they would surely post me there.

Instead, I was assigned to a small village called Camate-Shakaloke, to work with an organization called CPN les Papillons, Connaître et Protéger la Nature “les Papillons.” Papillon means butterfly in French. I thought maybe I would be working with butterflies.

It was actually a small tourism and education nonprofit, a modest inn and restaurant, eco-tours through the village and up into the hills, and facilities for community meetings. My future husband, Thomas D’Aquin Kouda, had helped form it. The wildlife I encountered was chickens, goats, cows, and the occasional snake. Monkeys, rarely.

And I didn’t miss the exotic animals. Not once.

Because Africa, the real Africa, the one that doesn’t make it onto safari brochures, became about something else entirely. The people. The culture. The way communities hold each other. The extraordinary ordinary life of a place the rest of the world had decided wasn’t worth looking at carefully.

I remember one evening, sitting outside D’Aquin’s family photography studio alongside the main road going north, sharing a glass of sodabi (the local distilled palm wine, something like moonshine) with D’Aquin, his father, and a few other men. The conversation had drifted to money, specifically to the various aid organizations that came through, bringing funding, plans, and decisions made somewhere far away by people who had never lived there. One man looked up and said:

“I wish they would just give us the money. We know what to do with it. We don’t need anyone telling us what to do with it.”

I still think about that conversation.

That nagging feeling from Namibia? It finally had a name.

I didn’t want to observe from a comfortable distance. I wanted to belong, even briefly, to somewhere real.

That instinct, don’t impose, be invited. Observe, understand, then belong is the entire philosophy of Hello West Africa. It didn’t come from my dissertation. It didn’t come from a business book. It came from a payphone at JFK, a Namibian staff member who missed sour milk, a library nobody asked for, a glass of sodabi on a dirt road, and a small tourism and education nonprofit with a butterfly in their name in a village I hadn’t planned to go to.

Every experience shaped the design.

And Dr. Laurie Marker? The woman who decided there was no “they” and just did it herself?

I think about her too.

What Really Happened Last Week

I had a list. It was ambitious. Here is what the list said and what actually happened:

Finish the final version of the business plan draft — done. ✅ Sending it to my SCORE advisor this week. (And since we’re building in public, I used LivePlan to put the financials together, and it is incredible. Especially for someone who loves watching other people build beautiful Excel sheets but is considerably less confident building them herself.)

Redo the website — started. Nowhere near finished. The website is currently somewhere between “old version” and “new vision,” which is its own special kind of chaos.

LinkedIn posts — done. ✅

Instagram — done. ✅ I have started working with an Instagram coach, which is already incredibly helpful. Social media is a landscape I have observed for a long time without fully participating in. Having someone to ask questions is making a real difference.

Start the pitch deck — did not happen. It is on this week’s list.

Actually call anyone about investment — also did not happen. This is the one that requires me to go through it rather than around it. Working up to it. Publicly. Right here.

So. Partial credit. Moving on.

What I’m Learning

Two things this week.

The first: building in public is not a social media invention. Walt Disney set up a time-lapse camera while building Disneyland in the 1950s and shared the footage with people. He wanted them to watch something being created in real time. He also said something I keep coming back to:

“The park means a lot to me in that, it’s something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing. A thing I can keep building as long as I can get some money to build it with.”

That’s exactly what Hello West Africa is. The impulse to bring people along, to make the building itself part of the story, is not new. It’s human. I find that genuinely comforting.

The second: I always overestimate what I can accomplish in a week, usually because I forget that I am also the CEO of my family. (The title comes with no salary and considerable responsibility.) I’m working on time blocking by starting with tracking where my time actually goes, using the Toggl app. It is both illuminating and occasionally disconcerting. Laura Vanderkam would approve.

I also have a bulletin board now, inspired by someone on Instagram, where I can see everything and physically move things around. Visual, tangible, real. Much better than a list I can’t see.

What’s Coming Next

This week, the pitch deck gets started; no more avoiding it. The website continues. And I am going to make at least one phone call about an investment. Actually asking the question to give money. One. That’s the goal. One name, one conversation.

I have been thinking about setting up a time-lapse of my own, of the website being built, or the pitch deck taking shape. Mostly, I stare at a screen, which is less cinematic than Disney’s construction crew. But the spirit is the same.

I also plan to start sharing some of the tools and apps that are making this build easier. I love finding things that work, even if that means occasionally going down a rabbit hole for hours. (Nerdy, I know, but also so much fun. And most of the time, worth it. Usually.)

I can’t wait for the day I get to tell you the capital has been raised and we are heading back to Benin. When that happens, I’ll start sharing what’s happening on the ground at Kabole, the construction updates, the property, and the community. That’s the part of this story I can’t wait for you to see.

In My Free Time

It rained all week here in Washington. And then on Friday, it flooded. The second time this winter, the first being December. The gray is something I haven’t quite made peace with, but I appreciate the moments when the sun appears. We got out for a couple of walks. We made homemade pizza, dough and all.

The episode of The Pitt was something else. No spoilers.

On the reading list this week:

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Queen Charlotte by Julia Quinn Tales from Another Mother Runner, edited by Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea, because I am attempting to get back into running, and reading stories of other mothers running sparks the joy in running that I know is there.

And the daily crossword. Always the daily crossword.

The boys are well. Life between here and Benin continues, even when Benin feels far away.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — The library nobody asked for. I think about that more than you might expect. It’s in the DNA of everything we’re building.

This time of the year in Benin, where we live, you start praying for rain. Every dark cloud you see sparks another conversation about how it’s been so long since it has rained, and that those clouds are certainly holding a wonderful secret. You see, it is nearing the end of the dry season. Water hasn’t fallen from the sky since at least November or early December before.

The dirt roads are so parched that they are cracking. Everything is dull, brown, dry, and dusty. The large cisterns have dried up, and we have to pull out the familiar yellow containers and head to the local water pumps, or, in our case, most of the time, hire someone or get the neighborhood kids to do it.

You wait…and wait…to hear those first drops of rain on the tin roofs. And then, one day, in late March or early April, the sky darkens, the air chills, and you hear it.

Pitter. Patter. Pitter. Patter.

Everyone rushes around to pick up anything that shouldn’t get wet. Windows are closed. Any type of bucket or basin you can find is brought outside to catch the rain. No more using the yellow containers! And then you run out on the front porch and breathe in the air heavy with rain, and you feel like you are in one of those CDs that get played while getting a massage, rain hitting the tin roof. A giant smile makes its way to your face, and conversations almost seem to get a bit lighter.

The brown landscape turns green in less than a week. And so begins the planting season.

Rain. So unbelievably happy to see it.

Something I’m sorry to say I’m tired of seeing right now as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest.

A Little Background

That green, the one that arrives after the first rain, is exactly what I picture when I think about Kabole. Our property. The place where Hello West Africa is being built, piece by piece, from two continents at once.

For those who are new here, Hello West Africa is rooted in a specific place: our property in Benin, a small country nestled between Nigeria and Togo. The village of Kabole, where our house sits, is about 2.5 hours north of Cotonou, between the cities of Dassa and Glazoué. We have had this property for about 15 years, and began building our house on it around 2013. We surprised my parents with the build when we all traveled over in 2015. What a fun secret that was to reveal!

D’Aquin has been going back and forth to Benin over the last few years while I finished my doctorate and navigated various life things here in Washington State. I haven’t been back to Benin in a while. That’s a fact I sit with sometimes, the strange experience of building a company in a place you are temporarily far from. But the work has continued. We dug a well two years ago. We added a larger terrace along the side of the house last year. We’ve made it possible to add a second floor, where the Hello West Africa offices will eventually be located when we are in country.

The house currently has four large bedrooms. We want to renovate all of them to include en-suite bathrooms and add three guest bungalows on the property. Solar panels are on the list as well, since the sun is often out and electricity costs in Benin are high. Landscaping. Furnishings. All of it, piece by piece.

It is very much a construction project. D’Aquin has done an incredible job of managing various building projects in Benin from here in Washington.

This is what building Hello West Africa actually looks like.

So, here’s what has led to where we are today.

It started last September or October, when I finally believed in myself and got the ball rolling on developing the business plan. I reached out to a friend I had met during COVID in Benin, someone who was working for Peace Corps Benin (and had been a PCV there before) and was familiar with budgeting using local prices. Together, we worked out an initial financial forecast: what it would cost to run a tour, what the construction numbers looked like, and whether any of this was remotely viable. Without that conversation, I’m not sure I would have started.

From there, through a TikTok that my husband mentioned to me, I connected with a Certified Business Advisor at the Washington Small Business Development Center, and began drafting the business plan and financial forecast in earnest. Having someone else’s eyes on it, someone who asked hard questions and didn’t let me be vague about the numbers, was exactly what I needed.

Then December rolled along, and I noticed a trend on Instagram where people were doing various challenges, and I thought, well, why don’t I try to raise $300,000 in 30 days for the startup capital? I was excited about it. And then, well, it was a lot harder than I thought, and it didn’t happen. The momentum stalled, the holidays arrived, and I took a break. I won’t pretend I wasn’t feeling the weight of that. When you put something close to your heart out into the world, and it doesn’t land the way you hoped, it’s hard not to take it personally.

But here’s what happened instead.

I started talking about Benin. I put out posts in different Facebook groups and had the opportunity to speak at five or six events to real people. And something shifted. Talking about Hello West Africa out loud, watching people’s faces when I described the community and what it means to actually live in a place rather than visit it…it made the whole thing more real. The story got sharper every time I told it.

In one of those conversations, I met a returned Peace Corps volunteer who introduced me to a local RPCV group and recommended I reach out to SCORE. That’s how I found David, my SCORE advisor. We’ve met three times now. The first meeting was humbling; his feedback was hard to hear, and I had a choice about how to receive it. I chose to go back and make a better version. Draft two was significantly stronger. Last week, we moved on to draft three.

That’s where Hello West Africa stands today. Business plan in progress. Numbers are getting tighter. This newsletter has been launched. The dream is getting more real by the week.

What’s Coming Next

This week, I’m turning my attention to growing our presence on Instagram and LinkedIn and beginning to draft a pitch for potential investors. That second one is the one that makes my stomach flip a little.

I love talking about Benin and Hello West Africa. I love the conversations it starts. But asking for money, asking someone to believe in a dream enough to put real dollars behind it, is a different kind of vulnerable. I’ve done it before. I know the no’s will come, and I know that’s okay. But when something is this close to your heart, you protect it.

I’ll also be updating the Hello West Africa website. I put one together last fall, but things have changed a bit, so I want to make sure everything sounds cohesive.

So this week: Instagram, LinkedIn, the pitch deck (anyone want to be my guinea pig?), version four of the business plan, and the website.

All of it. One thing at a time.

What I’m Learning

There’s a quote I was reminded of this past week. It’s from Zootopia, of all places, Judy Hopps, during the speech at the Zootopia Police Academy graduation:

“The more we try to understand each other, the more exceptional each of us will be. But we have to try. And I implore you…try. Try to make the world a better place.”

I know. A Disney bunny. But I think about this more than I’d like to admit. (The boys and I just watched Zootopia 2, which is why it was fresh in my mind.)

Because what I’m learning…from the speaking engagements, from the SCORE meetings, from the conversations with people who lean in when I talk about Benin…is that Hello West Africa is not just a tourism company. It’s an argument. An argument that understanding each other, really understanding each other, is worth the effort. That the world gets better when curious people go somewhere unfamiliar and come back changed.

That’s not a business pitch. That’s a belief I’ve been carrying since 2007.

The other thing I’m learning is best said through the words of a children’s book by Michael Rosen:

“We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! I’m not scared…Uh oh…long wavy grass…we can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it!”

Asking people to subscribe to the newsletter was uncomfortable for me. I am not someone who naturally promotes herself. But when I sent those messages, and people responded, when the conversations started, I remembered why I was doing it. It’s like finishing a workout. You have to remember how it feels at the end, not in the middle. Reading Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance has also been helpful in this moment.

You can’t go around it. You’ve got to go through it.

And Now, Your Turn

When you’ve had to ask for something that really mattered to you (support, money, a chance), what helped you actually do it?

Hit reply and tell me. Or answer the poll below. I read everything.

How I spent my free time last week…

Outside of the build, life has been full in the best ways.

I finished At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities by Heather Webber, a fantastic, light read that I highly recommend. (It fits in surprisingly well with what I’m doing right now, actually.)

I took the boys to Comic Con in Seattle last week. I grew up watching Star Trek, so walking into a space where people were dressed as their favorite characters, geeking out without apology, was something I wanted my kids to experience. Because there was certainly no way when I was their age that I would have done that. My oldest looked at me at the end of the day and said, “I’m so grateful for today. It was so awesome.”

As a parent, it doesn’t get much better than that.

The weather has been brutal. I grew up in Alaska, so I can handle cold, but the wind here is something else entirely. I’ve been watching The Pitt (I was a devoted ER fan as a high schooler, when my parents let me stay up until 10 pm on Thursdays to watch it). I actually enjoy how streaming shows are releasing once a week rather than all at once. Kind of nice! The boys and I also watched Zootopia 2, which, as you now know, reminded me of Judy Hopps's words.

Until next Tuesday,

P.S. — If you’re just finding this newsletter, Issue No. 1 is where the story starts…in an overcrowded van in Benin in 2007, with a young woman who was absolutely certain she had everything figured out. She did not.

All she could see were the lights and feel the sweat dripping down her forehead as she sat on the hard floor of the more than full 18-passenger van. She had arrived in the little-known country only a few hours earlier, and all of her expectations were quickly being thrown out the window. Life was happening around her with no qualms about how it might look to an outsider. In the humid air, laughter and joy filled the space, offering such a stark contrast to her life in the US Pacific Northwest. The young woman swore she could almost feel a sense of home.

These people in this small country, which she had only learned about a few months earlier, would undoubtedly benefit from all she could teach them.

Little did she know that this country and its people would teach her and transform her life in more ways than she could imagine.

That night, she wrote in her journal.

I am not here to find a boyfriend. I am here to discover more about who I am.

She was so certain.

That young woman was me. July 2007. My first night in Benin, West Africa, as a newly arrived Peace Corps volunteer, sweaty and wide-eyed and absolutely convinced I had the whole thing figured out.

I did not have the whole thing figured out.

Within two years, I would be fluent enough in French to teach environmental education to over 1,000 students across 18 schools. I would design and execute a community sanitation project from fundraising to completion. I would lead international visitors through villages, farms, and nature sites I had come to love as my own. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, in direct defiance of the journal entry, I would fall in love with a man named Thomas D’Aquin Kouda, who was born and raised in the very community I had come to serve.

Dearest Reader, I married him. (Bridgerton fans, you know.)

Benin didn’t need me to teach it anything. It had been waiting to teach me.

That was seventeen years ago. And here is what has been true every single day since:

I have never stopped thinking about going back. Not just to visit, but to build.

The shape of it was already forming while I was still in the Peace Corps, because I thoroughly enjoyed meeting, guiding, and teaching the visitors who came through CPN les Papillons. A tourism company. Real people, curious people, people hungry for more than a resort and a highlight reel, brought into the Benin I had lived in. The Benin of community and ceremony and extraordinary ordinary life.

I turned the dream over in my hands for years. In 2018, I finally put it on paper. A real business plan. And then I made the mistake of asking the wrong person to read it.

What came back wasn’t feedback. It was a verdict. The idea was ridiculous. I shouldn’t have had it in the first place. That’s how it felt, anyway, like someone had looked at the thing I’d built carefully with both hands and just... knocked it over. And the worst part? Part of me believed them. The $300,000 in startup capital didn’t help, either. The gap between the dream and the doing felt, in that moment, like a canyon I had no bridge for.

So I put the dream away.

Except I couldn’t, not really.

Because here is the thing about a dream that belongs to you: it doesn’t care how many times you set it down. It just keeps finding its way back.

I went back to school. Got a doctorate. And my dissertation, which I told myself would be about changing Benin's entire educational system, turned out to be about transformative learning theory and online education. In fact, a five-week virtual cultural tour of Benin. The dream walked right in through the academic back door and sat down like it owned the place. Because it did.

I finished my EdD in 2025. And somewhere in the exhaustion and the pride and the strange silence after years of relentless work, something became very clear to me.

If I can do that, I can do anything.

The fear didn’t go away. But it stopped being a reason.

And then I looked at my 3 kids…watching everything, absorbing everything, learning from everything I do and everything I don’t do, and I thought: what exactly am I showing them if I stop here?

I didn’t stop.

Between Here and Benin is the story of what happens next.

D’Aquin and I are building Hello West Africa, a cultural immersion travel company rooted in the communities of Benin, where we have spent the last seventeen years building relationships, acquiring property, conducting research, and quietly, stubbornly, refusing to let the dream go.

We are not there yet. We are in the middle of it, meeting with advisors, building out the business plan with the help of a SCORE mentor, getting the numbers right, and finding the people who believe in what we’re building. It is exciting and terrifying and real in the way that only things you’ve wanted for a very long time can be real.

I’m going to write about all of it. The wins, the stuck moments, and the things I don’t know yet. The business, the country, and the theory behind why I believe that travel, the kind that asks something of you, can actually change a person.

I’m building this in public. And I’d like you to come with me.

You don’t need to know where Benin is. You just need to be curious.

Welcome to Between Here and Benin.

— Dr. Debra Kouda

New here? I’m Debra — researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and the woman in that van. My husband Thomas D’Aquin and I are co-founders of Hello West Africa, a cultural immersion travel company based in Benin, West Africa. This newsletter is where I build it out loud. I’m glad you found it.

Already a reader from Life with Debra K? You know how I write. Thank you for following me here. The story just got bigger.

Some of you were on the receiving end of email blasts that came from my Dad.

It was 2003. I was a senior at Oregon State, interning at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. The Internet wasn't what it is today, and I had the opportunity to send an email about once a week. I’d send it to my Dad, and he would forward it to the list of people who had helped me get there in the first place, as I had fundraised my way onto the African continent for the first time. It was my first digital newsletter, before I (or anyone else, really) knew what a digital newsletter was. Written from another continent, trying to keep the people I loved close, and on the journey with me. I wanted them to feel like they were there with me.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Four years ago, I started writing to you again. This time from Benin, West Africa, where our family had decided to ride out the pandemic. Substack, a new online platform for writers, had just emerged, and I wanted to try it. I wanted to establish a good writing practice. Keep in touch with people even though we were on another continent. D’Aquin and I had traveled through near-empty airports and airplanes to get there, and suddenly we were living a life without masks and climbing death tolls, in a country that most of you had to look up on a map when I first mentioned it.

So did I, by the way, when I found out that’s where I was going to spend my time as a Peace Corps volunteer back in 2007.

Benin. A small, quietly extraordinary country in the western part of Africa. I fell in love with it…the people, the culture, the way of life. And even though D’Aquin and I returned to the US in 2009, we never fully left. That’s how we were able to bring our family there during Covid. We had a home waiting for us. A community.

Benin stayed with me. It always does.

And you stayed with me, too.

I know there were gaps. Long ones. And yet, you showed up. You opened the emails when they came. In fact...I was just being me, overthinking and procrastinating putting words on the proverbial page.

We came back to the US at the beginning of 2022, into the second semester of my doctoral program, homeschooling my kids and trying to hold it all together. There were many points during those years when I questioned why I was doing it, especially when I became pregnant and gave birth to our third son at the end of 2023. But I persevered. I pivoted in my research. I produced a dissertation I am extremely proud of.

And my kids watched me go through the whole thing. That part matters most.

Thank you. Sincerely, thank you.

A short update on Mireille.

For those who have been here since last August, Mireille is D’Aquin’s sister. She has been living with double kidney failure, going for dialysis once, sometimes twice a week, in a country where that kind of sustained medical care is not simple or cheap.

When I shared her story with you, you gave. People who had never met her, never been to Benin, never heard her name before I wrote it in a newsletter…you gave. Together, from this little community, we raised nearly $4,000. The family began fundraising in Benin this past January and has now raised $25,000. Mireille is still in treatment. The road is still long. But she is here and persevering.

So. Here’s what I came to tell you.

Life with Debra K is getting a new name. And a new purpose.

Tomorrow, I’m relaunching. New name. New focus. Same honest narrator you’ve been reading for four years, but with something more specific to say and somewhere more intentional to go.

The new newsletter is called Between Here and Benin.

It’s the story of building Hello West Africa. A cultural immersion travel company that D’Aquin and I have spent seventeen years quietly constructing from the inside of two continents, two languages, two ways of being in the world. It’s a founder’s journal. A love letter to a country most people still have to look up on a map. A place where I’ll think out loud about transformative learning, about what it really means to cross cultures, about the business of building something that has never existed before.

The subscribe link is the same. You don’t need to do anything. If you’re reading (or listening) to this, you’re already invited. All you have to do is show up tomorrow.

One last time, and one more time: thank you for being here.

— Debra

P.S. — Mireille says thank you too. She doesn’t know all your names, but I do.

So, I had this realization the other day. I was just sitting at my desk and looked up at the bulletin board I keep above my computer, still full of notes from my doctoral days, and there it was, the ten phases of transformational learning proposed by Jack Mezirow in his Transformative Learning Theory glaring right at me.

And then I had a lightbulb 💡 moment. Wow, I’m right in the middle of the last two phases:

Phase 9: Building Competence and Confidence — gaining confidence as new behaviors or thoughts become more familiar.

Phase 10: Reintegration — adapting the new perspective into one’s life, making it part of how you think or act regularly.

Now, these phases don’t necessarily happen in order, but the research says they’re the hardest ones to go through. And let me tell you, the research is right, because I’m living it right now.

So I thought, well, maybe I should talk this out. Because that’s what I do. And maybe some of you are in these phases too, in your own way, even if you’ve never named them.

For those who don’t know, transformational learning has basically been my life for the last two years. It’s what I studied, it’s what I researched, it’s what I lived while doing my doctorate. And when I look back, I can actually see myself moving through the phases, not in a straight line, but hitting those different moments that Mezirow and his colleagues outlined. And now? Now I’m stuck…or maybe just sitting…in reintegration.

Reintegration is where you’re supposed to take all the knowledge, all the perspective shifts, all the growth, and weave it into your actual life. Not your academic papers or your dissertation, but your real, everyday life. The one with kids, with work, with bills, with everything else you’re carrying. And honestly? Easier said than done. It sounds straightforward when you read it in theory: take what you’ve learned and apply it.

But living it. Living it is another thing entirely.

And I think that’s where support matters most. In my research, I found this over and over again: you need people. You need community. You need some kind of space to process, because otherwise it’s just you, floating around with this big identity shift that you don’t quite know what to do with. And I can’t help but wonder, what if higher ed actually focused on that? Not just delivering knowledge or handing you a diploma, but walking with you through this messy reintegration stage.

When I started my program, my focus was clear, or at least I thought it was. I was going to change the educational system in Benin. That was it. I had a plan. I imagined creating an organization that could support students, teachers, and communities. I thought this degree would give me the skills to make it happen. But as I went through the program, things shifted. My focus shifted. I became more interested in the process itself, in how transformational learning works, because I realized it’s not just something that happens in a classroom. It happens in life. It happens when you move to a new country, or when you homeschool your kids, or when you take on a role you never imagined you’d have. It happens all the time.

And the funny thing is, most of us don’t even realize it when it’s happening. Unless we name it, we can’t see it clearly. But once you do see it, once you say, “Oh, that’s what this is,” it changes everything.

Now, here’s where it gets personal. My doctoral program was completely online. I never set foot in the Mary Lou Fulton School at Arizona State University. I never met my professors in person. I was lucky enough to meet two of my classmates, but I only knew the others through Zoom.

And when it all wrapped up, when I defended my dissertation, made my revisions, submitted the final copy…that was it.

Done.

No graduation ceremony for me, by choice. No closure. Just… over.

And frankly? It felt like being dropped off a cliff. One day, I was deep in edits and revisions, living and breathing my dissertation. The next day, silence.

Sure, I got the surveys asking, “What did you think of the program? What are you doing now?” But that was it. No one checked in to ask, “Hey, how are you navigating this new identity?” No one said, “How’s reintegration going?” It was more like, “Congratulations, Doctor. Good luck out there.”

And that’s tough. Because, as Dan Butin (2010) explains in The Education Dissertation: A Guide for Practitioner Scholars, which we read in our first semester:

“Now complete, your dissertation process allows you to sail off on a very different kind of journey” (p. 148).

That journey is one that involves those last two phases of transformational learning, and it’s a phrase I certainly did not fully understand until the degree was in my hand and the dissertation was finished.

Now, let me back up for a minute, because there was one thing that made my program doable. And that was community. Around my second semester, January of 2022, I joined what we ended up calling the Goldilocks Community of Practice. This was a little group of us who just found each other, and we decided to meet twice a week. We did homework together, we had real discussions, and we supported each other. We even recorded some of our sessions to submit as assignments. And that community gave me what the official program didn’t.

But here’s the thing. Once we all graduated, the goal was gone. The whole reason we were meeting, to get through the doctorate together, disappeared. And people started trickling away. Some went back to their jobs. Some leaned into the degree for promotions or leadership roles. And that makes sense…life keeps moving. But the community lost its center. A few of us still talk, but it’s not the same. And the wheels started turning in my head: what if universities created something like that, but official? What if support communities continued after graduation, so reintegration wasn’t something you had to stumble through alone?

Because reintegration is not automatic. It’s emotional. It’s confusing. Some people step into it easily; they’re ready to claim the “Doctor” title and run with it. Others, like me, wrestle with it.

I still find myself asking:

What do I actually do with this degree?

How do I live into this identity?

Where do I take my ideas so they don’t just sit in a notebook?

And I’ll be honest: it can feel really lonely. I don’t work in a university. I don’t have an academic community around me. I homeschool my kids, I manage a household, and I work on entrepreneurial projects. I’ve been called a thought leader, which is flattering, but also frustrating, because there’s no map. I have ideas that I know could be useful, ideas about education and transformation and community, but finding a place where those ideas can grow? That’s the part where I’m stuck.

And if I’m being really honest here, online programs don’t help with that. Sometimes they feel like a numbers game. Load up the students, get them through the modules, and hand out the diplomas. In-person programs naturally create connections because you’re in the same room, bumping into people in hallways, and grabbing coffee after class.

Online? None of that happens unless someone builds it on purpose.

And most programs don’t. Most rely on the learning management system, the LMS, to do the work. But an LMS isn’t built for connection, or at least the ones that I have been a part of have not. It’s built to organize content, keep the grades in one place, host the modules, and track the assignments. That’s it. And yet outside academia, in the world of professional courses and the creator space, communities are popping up everywhere. It’s where people gather, where they stay motivated, where the learning actually sticks. Why hasn’t higher ed caught up?

Through all my time in the online education space, I’ve come to believe that online programs should be harder to design than in-person ones, because connection doesn’t happen naturally online; it has to be created. And yet so many are designed the exact opposite. If universities really cared about transformational learning, they’d invest in that. They’d make community the centerpiece, not an afterthought.

Without it, you end up with students like me: graduating, sitting in phases nine and ten, feeling a little lost, a little frustrated, and a lot alone.

So maybe that’s where my work is now. Maybe I need to create the kind of community I wish I had. Because transformational learning doesn’t end when you get the diploma. That’s actually when it begins. That’s when you have to figure out how to carry those new perspectives, those new ways of seeing the world, into your actual life.

And no one should have to do that alone.

Ahh presentations…

I absolutely love giving presentations. Everything that is involved in the process of creating an engaging, interesting, and informative presentation.

When did this fascination with presentations begin? I know that I have always enjoyed being in front of a group of people, singing or acting. Okay, I haven’t done that much acting, but a much younger me spent many nights belting out lyrics to Disney movies and Broadway plays (I’m sure that my family could vouch for me!). While it might sound a bit vain, I like to hear my voice, which is one reason I love recording the audio or podcast version of this newsletter. Plus, the more important fact of providing another option for folks to listen to my content.

I suppose if I had to pinpoint when my interest in putting presentations together really began, it would be during my freshman year at Oregon State University in the required communications course. The final project was an oral presentation, no slide decks then, to the small class about a topic you were passionate about. I chose the ever-confrontational issue of banning books. I remember looking at my notes and presenting to the class, moving my hands in the air. I was hooked. From that time forward, I relish every time I have the opportunity to make a presentation.

One of my favorite presentations that I gave was in a job interview to work at Apple. Man, I worked hard on the slides. I watched numerous Apple Keynotes and even designed my own app icon graphics. What a blast it was! Sadly, while my communications skills were top-notch, my technical skills were slightly below what they were looking for. Nonetheless, the experience was awesome!

Maybe you have guessed, but for this week’s edition, I have decided to share my dissertation defense presentation with you. While there are some of you who might be curious about my research, I have yet to finish up a short synopsis to share. The next best thing, and especially because it has pictures, is the presentation that I made for the defense. I have recorded this using Loom, and while my real defense had animations included, this version does not. For those of you listening to the audio, I have included a link to the presentation in the show notes if you happen to be outside of Substack.

Transformative Learning Through Virtual Tourism: Exploring Africa in the Digital Space - Watch Video

So go ahead, pour yourself a cup of coffee, steep a cup of tea, or drink an ice-cold fizzy drink as you settle in for my dissertation defense presentation…complete with slides, stories, and plenty of heart.

Thanks for sticking with me and my stories!

Cheers…

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 having an impact on, I was having a hard time piecing it together in a way that made sense to me. And this was a big realization. You have to be 100% in on the topic that you are going to be researching because it will be your life for the next few years - so if it was seeming difficult to find the right research questions and intervention for the study now, it meant that a change was necessary. I thought this was going to be hard, but when I explained my thoughts about the new dissertation topic, my mentor said that my eyes lit up when I was talking about it, showing that this really was a good direction to be going in. She asked for a short write-up of what the purpose and possible intervention could be before we made the final decision to do the big switch. After many discussions with my little CoP and research into various topics, the new dissertation thesis all came together.

The change was officially made in July 2023 and I went about putting together my dissertation proposal which would be presented to my committee sometime during the fall semester. This change in topic was a huge shift for me, but I knew that it was the right one. It made for a lot of work, as most of my colleagues were continuing with their research from the first two cycles, I was pretty much starting all over. However, I was excited about diving into all the research to be done into the new ideas. I poured over articles and scoured books putting the proposal together. Although we had written longer papers for the other cycles of research, this proposal felt more like the real deal. It included three chapters which were

* Research Problem and Context

* Review of Scholarly Literature

* Methods

It was also during this time that I was able to select two additional members of my doctoral committee, bringing the total to three, a chair and two committee members. Their role in the doctoral process was to guide me through the dissertation process, ensuring academic rigor and scholarly development through support, feedback, and oversight. My mentor (aka the Chair of the Committee) spoke early on to our LSC group that when she started to see us as colleagues and not students we had gone over the bridge to doctor-hood.

Due to a new addition to the family in December 2023 one day before I was supposed to present my dissertation proposal, I presented my proposal to my committee in January 2024. The purpose of my study was

This study aims to create a transformative learning experience for foreign tourists visiting Benin within a brief travel period. My engagement in various travel experiences throughout the years has inspired ideas that could be integrated to make such a form of tourism viable. To support me in this undertaking, I will draw upon the principles of transformative learning theory and a newly formulated conceptual model of transformative tourism (Kouda, 2024, p. 14) with the following research questions

RQ1: What factors or processes make transformational learning possible for a tourist in a foreign country?

RQ1A: How does prior preparation and post-reflection impact the transformational experience?

RQ1B: How does the incorporation of “knowledge exchanges” impact the transformational experience?

RQ1C: How does the tour coordinator impact the transformational experience? (Kouda, 2024, p. 15)

Now this was a huge undertaking that I had signed up for, to find and give people a live tour in Benin. But I knew that the findings would be rewarding, and they ticked the boxes of providing people with a (hopefully) transformative experience and providing jobs to community members through tourism.

As the spring moved along my study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of ASU the administrative body in existence to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects. Around the same time, after a doctor’s visit, I realized that my youngest son would not be able to travel to Benin because he was unable to get the yellow fever vaccine until 9 months of age, which put it in the last scheduled semester of the program.

Once again, I was at a crossroads.

I went into one of our Zoom CoP calls at the end of May somewhat distraught. I told my friends/colleagues that I thought I was going to have to stop my research until travel to Benin was possible. No way, I remember them saying. There has to be a way for you to do your research without delay.

Conversations with my peers left me with a light bulb moment, and then it was another talk with my mentor - about a year after the previous big change. In June 2024 I presented the idea to my mentor that I would take the research out of in-person and deliver a transformational learning experience to participants in an online tour of Benin. She agreed with the caveat that the two other committee members had to sign off on the change.

The next month was a whirlwind. I rewrote my purpose and research questions and laid out what the online tour (my intervention) would look like. Here were the revisions

The purpose of my study remains the same, with a shift in the location of transformative learning. This study now aims to create a transformative learning experience for tourists visiting Benin through a five-week online tour, drawing on transformative learning theory and the conceptual model of transformative tourism.

RQ1: What factors or processes make transformational learning possible for a tourist in a five-week online tour?

RQ1A: How do tourists’ prior experiences before the five-week online tour influence transformational learning?

RQ1B: What experiences during the five-week online tour contribute to transformational learning?

RQ1C: How do tourists’ reflections throughout the five-week online tour impact their transformational learning? (Kouda, 2024).

My proposed changes were accepted by my committee and the next step was to gain approval from the IRB.

My timeline was tight because I was going to try my hardest to research, analyze, and write up my full dissertation and graduate in December 2024, an awfully lofty goal but I certainly thought that I could pull it off! Wishful thinking is sometimes helpful in these situations.

I received IRB approval in mid-August and started looking for participants right away. The five-week online tour, the crux of my research, was set to begin the first week of September. Everything was falling into place. My husband traveled to Benin and was able to provide me with some new content that I would be able to share during the tour.

I guess I was fairly optimistic at this point that it would be super easy to find 8 participants for the online tour. However, this was not the case. Although I did have a rushed timeline, I was worried after a week that I would not have enough, as I only had 2 weeks to find participants before I had to begin the study. Everything ended up working out (thank goodness!) and I had 7 participants who completed all of their pre-tour interviews before the first official day of the tour. Really though, the pre-tour interviews are a real part of the tour, but in this context, I used them to gather one of my first sets of qualitative data.

By the way, I should have mentioned earlier, that I conducted a qualitative research study, meaning that I used holistic approaches to gather data, focusing on the rich narrative of the experience instead of a more qualitative (numbers-based) approach. One of the main reasons for this choice was that I was trying to understand a human experience, which is easier to understand through interviews and conversations. The data I collected came primarily from pre- and post-tour interviews, reflections from the participants during the online tour, dialogue of participants in the online community chat, and my research journal with notes and observations.

Moving on…the online tour was structured in the following way:

2 Zoom calls per week for 5 weeks (Monday and Thursday) - participants were not required to attend the Zoom calls. Replays were available in the online community.

An online community in Mighty Networks (similar to Facebook, but not attached in any way to social media) where I would post various prompts, and participants would submit reflections, and have access to replays of the Zoom calls that they had access to during the entire time of the tour

The first official day of the tour arrived and I was so nervous. I wanted everything to be perfect. And this is where it fell apart. I started the first Zoom call and it was a disaster. My computer setup was not right, I was having technical difficulties, and the kids were crying. There were three participants in that initial call, 2 of whom I did not know, and I just remember apologizing over and over. During one of the times that I said I was trying to fix the technical difficulties and turned off my video in Zoom, I almost started crying. I ended the call earlier than the hour it was supposed to be and just collapsed in tears.

What a mess it had been! My fear had completely taken over. I gave myself a few minutes and then started talking to my colleagues, and through the conversations realized that what had happened needed to occur for me to be successful with the tour. I had to remember that I was the one guiding the tour and that I was the authority on the content. I was certainly not an imposter. There also was the understanding that I had been very vulnerable in the Zoom, showing my participants I was 100% human!

From there, I knew that I was in charge, and decided to have the next Zoom session as the first official session. I put together my content and would you believe it - it was an amazing session there and going forward through the rest of the tour. When the tour was over, I remember commenting to my mentor, Wow! I never knew that research could be so fun! I had a blast giving the tour!

What I soon found out was that gathering the data was indeed the fun part. Up to this point, I had only done minimal data collection and analysis during my previous research cycles and during my master’s program about a million years ago (jk it was only in 2013, but might as well be a million!).

And here is where I ran into another hiccup. While I was conducting the tour, I became aware of the date November 1st. Why was this date important? Well, November 1st was the cut-off date for the graduate school at ASU to have defended your dissertation. A deadline that was hard for me to swallow. Graduation wasn’t until the middle of December, why was the deadline on November 1st?

November 1st. Okay, it’s gotta be done I told myself.

I finished the last post-tour interview on October 11th.

The clock was ticking.

October 2024 was stressful, to say the least. I began prepping my collected data for analysis. I decided to use thematic analysis to find the best answers to my research questions. This involved deductive as well as inductive in vivo coding so that I could capture the voices of the participants. Coding, if you have never done it before, is the process of labeling or tagging segments of data with descriptive keywords or phrases to categorize and organize information. It might look easy, but man - it is a skill that must get easier over time. And here, with the coding, is where I got stuck. I felt like had themes developing but I was having a tough time organizing my codes down to the right categories which would then nestle under my themes. At this point, October days just kept passing, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with my coding. I chatted with my mentor about my theme ideas and asked if I was going in the right direction, but all the codes. I had a tough time really seeing how it all fit together.

The November deadline came and went and I set myself up intending to defend my dissertation by the end of the fall semester. Yet, the analysis was still stumping me. Honestly, I felt like a failure and defeated because the majority of my cohort, including those in my Community of Practice, were graduating this semester. It was when we were “scheduled” to graduate according to the outline of the EdD program. But there I was. Stranded in a puddle of codes. Guess I was going to defend and graduate in Spring 2025.

The holidays came and went and I took a break from my data. I would sit down at the computer every once in a while and organize the codes in another manner (different versions of code mapping they call it) so that maybe it would finally click on what I was going to do. But the November 1st deadline and not graduating the previous December had me down. My little CoP, however, was still there for me. And we would chat at least once a week. Keeping the momentum going, even if it was a slow ooze.

At the beginning of February 2025, I received an email from my mentor outlining the new deadlines for the Spring semester.

March 28 - last day to schedule dissertation defense

April 14 - last day to defend and graduate in the spring semester

Deadlines have always been able to help me light the fuse, and this email did just that. I opened up my data and just started working. Putting it together. Figuring out the themes. Developing the categories. Writing.

The dissertation for us in the EdD program at ASU needed to contain 5 chapters.

* Research Problem and Context

* Review of Scholarly Literature

* Methods

* Results

* Discussion

I had already written the first two chapters for my proposal, and they would only need minor adjustments because my study had changed from an in-person to an online intervention. Chapter 3 had a good outline but basically needed to be rewritten to acknowledge the methods that were used during the study (post-tense). And chapters 4 and 5, they were brand new.

I began with rewriting chapter 3 because it was fairly straightforward. As we liked to say, chapter 3 is like a recipe. If someone wants to, they should be able to read your methods chapter and then replicate the study by following the instructions. Looking back, I’m not sure how I even started with Chapters 4 and 5. Within the program, this was the first time that I had written chapters 4 and 5. It was a bit daunting. Who am I kidding, it was as daunting as running a marathon. I did have exemplars of dissertations, but the problem here was every single one of the dissertations was different. There was not one chapter 4 or 5 that looked similar to another one.

I just started writing. A first draft of chapter 4 was sent to my mentor. It was returned with feedback. This went on for a couple of rounds, and in the meantime, I was writing up a first draft of chapter 5. On March 24th, 2025, I received an email from my mentor letting me know that I could go ahead and schedule my dissertation defense for April 14th. It was risky though, because that was the last day to have a defense for graduating in the spring. I rallied my other committee members and the dissertation date was set on the calendar. I had to have a copy of my full dissertation to my committee for them to read and review to prepare for the defense by April 4th. And my mentor had not even seen the first draft of chapter 5 yet. Gulp.

Even as I’m writing this, I honestly have no idea how I did it.

The two weeks that followed were a blur. Every spare moment I had I was sitting at my desk, staring at the words being written on my gorgeous Apple Studio Display (for those that are wondering, yes, this screen is absolutely amazing and totally worth the money). I probably drank way too much coffee, but I was taking regular walking breaks, and every time I would get back to the house, the walk would bring new ideas into my head about how I could write this or that.

Friday, April 4th arrived, and in the early evening, I sent out a copy of my full dissertation via Google Docs to my committee members. Woohoo! But I was not yet done. That night I also had to submit my dissertation through the formatting wizard that would me know if I had the document formatted correctly. This part was almost more frustrating than finishing up my chapters, but with the help of a friend and a last-minute Zoom call, I was able to move my paper from Google Docs to Microsoft Word and upload it to the wizard. This is when I felt one massive layer of stress fall away as my oldest son gave me the biggest hug asking Are you done writing Mom??!!

There might be a few of you reading this who are curious about the results of the study. As this is more of a reflection tale of my doctoral process, I won’t go through all the details here, but I still would like to share the major findings with you!

Here are the four themes:

* Where Design Meets Discovery: Shaping the Tour Experience

* The Interplay of Prior Experience and Motivation

* Reflection as a Mechanism for Change

* Transformational Learning Happens: Experiences, Reflections, and Mezirow’s Ten Phases

I found that transformational learning in an online tour IS possible, and this was done through the incorporation of five key strategies:

* There was flexibility in the learning design

* I used a participant-centered approach

* There were meaningful reflection activities

* I created a sense of cultural immersion through the use of photos, videos, original sound, and storytelling

* I allowed for ongoing feedback from participants and adapted the tour allowing them to guide the content

At some point, I would love to write more about this to a wider audience than just those in the academic sphere who have or know where to find my dissertation. It’s on the list of things to do (a book or article perhaps?).

So, where were we? I finished writing. I now had one week to put together my dissertation defense presentation. I love presenting. Putting together the presentation and speaking in front of a group of people, are two of my favorite things in the world to do.

April 14th dawned a beautiful sunny day. I put on a brightly colored dress and ran through my presentation one more time, making sure that all my ducks were in a row. At ten AM, my dissertation defense began. I was nervous, but also very excited to be presenting the research that I had designed, conducted, analyzed, and written about. Remember that disaster of a first day that I had with the online tour? Without that day, I don’t think I would have been as confident as I was on this glorious day.

I gave my presentation which was around 20 minutes or so, I never looked at the clock, and then it was time for questions from my committee. If anything, answering questions has always been difficult for me, but as it is with most things - the more you practice the better you get at it. I felt that I had improved at answering questions, which made me smile inside. Following the questions, the committee went into another Zoom room and discussed how I had done. This time is truly excruciating because I just thought about all the things that I could have done or answered differently. For the defense, I did have some friends watching, so it was comforting to be able to talk to them while waiting for the committee to return with the results…Pass or Fail.

After a time, the committee returned and said the words I think will stay in my head for a while…Congratulations Dr. Kouda! You have passed your defense with minor revisions to your dissertation. Wow. Wow. Wow. A huge smile appeared on my face and I really wanted to have a dance party. But I kept my composure, somehow!

I should probably explain the minor revisions to your dissertation part. When you defend, here are the responses that you can be given and their meanings:

Pass with no revisions - meaning that your dissertation is awesome the way it is and the committee members have officially signed off

Pass with minor revisions - the committee has a few minor tweaks they would like you to make before officially signing off

Pass with major revisions - the committee has some concerns and some major tweaks that need to happen before they officially sign off

Fail - I think we all know what this means

At the end of the Zoom for my dissertation defense, my chair (mentor) stayed with me to discuss the minor revisions to be made to my paper. I had less than one week to complete what needed to be rewritten and then be officially approved by my committee, making my deadline Monday, April 21st. Talk about nail biting. With these sorts of things, I always need at least a day to process the feedback and then how I would address it. Once again, somehow I was able to write and have feedback on my new revisions, and the revised dissertation was sent to my committee by the Friday before the deadline.

On the afternoon of Monday, April 21st, I received an email from my chair confirming that my dissertation was officially approved by all of my committee members. I was ecstatic! Pretty sure I did a bit of jumping and dancing - it was a moment to revel in my achievement.

But, I was not yet finished.

The last steps I had to complete were having my dissertation given the okay by the formatting wizards and then uploading it to ProQuest, the platform where all dissertations from ASU are published. Truth be told, I was tired by this point, while at the same time energized that I was almost finished with this process. Microsoft Word has to be my least favorite writing application for a multitude of reasons and I had not used it in years. I downloaded it to my computer just to complete the formatting process of my dissertation. I finally was able to work out all the formatting issues with my dissertation, and on Friday, April 25th, I uploaded my magnificent piece of work to ProQuest.

I’m not sure exactly what I did when I uploaded my document, but I’m sure that I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I was done. And I was Dr. Debra Kouda. I had achieved the goal of earning a doctorate that I had set out to do four years prior.

As I sit here typing those words I am getting emotional. The transitions from doctoral student to doctoral candidate, to doctor are real, and I am just now starting to embrace the reality of this title that I worked so hard to receive. I was lucky enough to have a mentor who started talking to me about this shift in identity about a year ago - otherwise, this part is not really discussed in any course. But it truly is an identity shift that will take a bit of time, at least for me, to fully own. I most certainly deserve it but I have to constantly remind myself that I am Dr. Debra Kouda, Doctor of Education in Leadership and Innovation.

And now it is time to put this new identity to work. What are my plans for the future? I’m glad you asked!

I’ll give you a little teaser…My mission going forward is to help people incorporate transformational learning into their online courses.

Writing all of this down in this reflective process has been incredibly beneficial for me and I would like to thank you if you made it this far!

If you happen to be pursuing a Doctorate shortly, especially a Doctorate of Education in a fully online program, here are a few pieces of advice I could offer.

Find a group to go through the program with. I dare to say that my experience would not have nearly been as incredible - or maybe would I have even finished - if it had not been for the Community of Practice. Going to school online can be a lonely experience, and even if you think you want to do it alone, trust me, you don’t. Humans are meant to learn together.

Be okay with making adjustments or completing changing your problem of practice or the purpose of your research, even if it means a lot more work for you. You absolutely have to be passionate about what you are researching because your focus is like a needle in a haystack that you will be searching for for quite a while.

The ebbs and flows are a natural part of the doctoral journey. There were certainly moments when I was not sure what in the world I was doing or how I was going to work through a certain situation. However, it is in these moments when innovation can happen. Looking back, if I had not had the conversation with the investor, I would not have had the idea to change my research topic. Had the new addition to my family not happened, I would not have had to innovate and change my research intervention to the online space. What I finally landed on was absolutely perfect for me and my future plans.

When it comes to writing, just write. I heard that over and over again, however, I am a perfectionist when it comes to writing and it was very hard for me (and it still is) to write knowing that it is not perfect the first time around. I had to tell myself time and time again, to just start writing. Get the first draft done. Have the first round of feedback, and then the second, and third, and then you will be done. But you have to start writing first.

Don’t be afraid to be creative. One of the best books that I read during the last 4 years was Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace. In so many ways I feel that higher education is on the straight and narrow with very little wiggle room for creativity. Why do I feel that way, well that is for another newsletter, but when it came to the doctoral process it sometimes felt the more creative my colleagues and I became, the wall put in front of us became bigger and stronger. Education, of all disciplines, should be one of the most creative. We are dealing with human beings and to help each one of them learn we have to pull from every creative bone we have. But, like I said, that is for another newsletter. Just be creative! It might make people ask more questions but that just means that you are moving in the right direction.

I am sure there are things that I will think of in the future that would be helpful, but I suppose one of the biggest things to do is…

Persevere.

You know how people choose a word of the year, persevere would be my word for the doctoral process. You just have to keep going, kind of like the Energizer Bunny.

I think we are nearing the end of this reflection piece. Finally, I’m sure you are thinking. So let us go back to the beginning question of why I pursued a doctoral degree.

Here is one reason that I have now, an analogy to sports, which I learned from a friend whom I met during my courses at ASU. When someone is talented or good at basketball, they want to be in the NBA; hockey, the NHL; soccer (aka futbol), the Premier League, and so on. I have always been good and felt comfortable in the academic environment, especially when I reached higher education. And I’m not talking about taking tests well or getting good grades, both of which I honestly deplore, it is the fact that I am challenged by so many people who have different views than I do. It allows me to expand and grow and change, to not be forced or want to hide my intellectual prowess, but to embrace it. I wanted to be in the Premier League. I wanted to be in the NBA - and I made it, in the academic context.

The second and probably the most important is that I figured out what my purpose is. I suppose four years ago I was going through some sort of mid-life crisis, trying to figure out what my purpose was - I mean, I think I have been trying to figure that out since I was about 10. I am a wife, mother, daughter, and sister, but there was something that I was missing - the work part, where I am creating value and being able to see the value that I am creating to serve people (and I will diving into more of this later after I’m finished reading the book Build the Life you Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happy by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey). I am a natural teacher and have been for a long time, but I was never quite sure what I was supposed to teach.

Throughout this dissertation process, I was led to it through leadership and innovation on my part and wound up with transformational learning in online education (formal and informal) being what I love to teach, and feel that it is certainly needed in the online education environment.

And I guess I should clarify what definition of leadership I am referring to in the above paragraph. I had the great honor of working with a colleague over the past four years who clarified and gave sense to what leadership is. His dissertation was all about leadership and innovation, looking at them in completely new ways. Freshly published in ProQuest, here is the definition by Steven Nash (2025) from his dissertation PROMETHEUS FIRE A Study Considering and Enabling Innovative Agency for Canadian Special Operations NCOs,

Leadership is a social dynamic of human interaction and relationships that causes people to engage with a leader and others in the pursuit of a common goal. It is predicated on the subjective emotional trust relationships which tend to be emotional and subjective. It is a naturally occurring dynamic, in that leaders need not be formally named nor appointed to have influence on others (p. 67).

And now, here is Nash’s (2025) definition of innovation, where he uses a metaphor for explanation. As I want to be very clear about what the definition is, I am giving it to you in his words. It is rather long and we would be highly discouraged from doing this in our dissertation, I feel that clarity on the topic is important here - and this is not a dissertation I am writing.

I offer another metaphor for my distilled definition of creativity and innovation. As an example, consider a balloon, since it can be filled up with air in a highly predictive manner. This context is merely a common process, and the balloon will tend to remain inert unless the contained air escapes by puncture or other means, initiating some movement according to the effects of physics. However, if we fill the same balloon with helium, it will tend to then come to life in Earth’s atmosphere and float or bounce around quite randomly. This helium filled balloon, in my view, is creativity or creative thought, as it is on the move, taking itself to new places in unpredictable, largely meandering ways, but without any specific direction or purpose. If I tie a string to the same balloon and take the string in my hand, I suggest that I have now created innovation, which is creativity with a designated purpose.

Following from this, and related to the upcoming discussion of innovative suppression, if the string is more like a heavy steel bar (perhaps representing the tyranny of bureaucratic process, policy, and procedures), then even the helium (representing creativity in the system) cannot elevate the balloon to anywhere new and interesting. In the converse case, too light a string can snap, perhaps without me knowing, and the balloon/creativity will likely return to randomized and potentially interesting wandering (p.79).

Wow. Chew on those new definitions and let me know what you think.

I am absolutely amazed at how wonderful it has been to write all of this down. Reflection truly is a wonderful mechanism for change.

I will leave you here now, but just know that there will be more newsletters coming as I work on owning my new identity (Dr. Debra Kouda - woohoo!) and living life with my family and friends. As we read in the very first semester - the doctorate is just the arduous first process in this journey of being a practitioner-scholar.

On that note, thank you so much to everyone who has supported me throughout these last 4 years, whether through discussions and words of encouragement or financially through a subscription to this newsletter.

Gratefully yours - Debra Kouda, EdD

References

Kouda, D. (2025). Transformative Learning Through Virtual Tourism: Exploring West Africa in the Digital Space. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.2015445

Nash, S. (2025). PROMETHEUS FIRE A Study Considering and Enabling Innovative Agency for Canadian Special Operations NCOs. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201243

Hello, and I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because I feel like I am an executive chef in my private kitchen. The hustle and bustle of timing everything just right to be ready for the determined mealtime is my jam. This year, my Mom and I decided to do a bit of prep work the day before Thanksgiving, and let me tell you, that is the way to go! Thanksgiving this year was relaxed and not rushed - and the bag for the turkey didn’t have a hole burned in it like last year so that was a blessing!

If you are wondering what I mean by “bag for the turkey” - Reynolds makes these amazing large oven-safe bags that fit everything from a chicken, to a ham, to a 20-pound turkey. All you do is throw in a tablespoon of flour (so the bag doesn’t explode), place in your turkey, close the bag, place a few holes in the top of the bag, and place it in the oven. Just like that. No basting the turkey, just letting it cook until the appropriate temperature. The turkey comes out moist, with all the juices contained so that you can make an amazing turkey gravy!

Has anyone reading this ever used a turkey bag? I tell you, you will never go back once you do!

My evenings were spent working on a variety of different things - mainly on the computer. And while I was working, I observed my 10-year-old make stop-motion videos with his Lego Avengers. He patiently snapped photo after photo, moved each piece, and then we turned it into a mini-movie on Canva. My 7-year-old sat behind me, my little “editor” I called him. Thought I’d share the first finished video with you here:

A new month also means a new wallpaper for my computer desktop. A sort of goals and vision board for the month. Most of the time it looks like a crowded collage, but this time, I just needed something simple. Also, the last couple of months have had my research questions plastered right on them. Very handy to have those front and center instead of always having to search for them! Although, honestly by now, I probably should know them by heart!

Speaking of my dissertation, that has been taking up a lot of my free time lately. I completed my data collection in the middle of October, and have since then been analyzing the qualitative data. And wow, I underestimated how long it would take to do that. For some reason, I thought that it would be super duper easy. Well, they call it a doctorate for a reason I guess! It has been very interesting, and so far, I am very happy with the results that are turning up. Now it's time to get down to the brass tacks - and get some serious writing done. Well, maybe not too serious. This research has been so much fun for me. I need to carry that feeling into the writing phase!

Although really, when are doctoral dissertations going to be more than a massive chapter-based paper that very few people will read? There were a lot of us going into this doctoral program who wanted to do something “innovative” for our dissertations. But somehow, we are all doing the standard five-chapter paper. Tradition? Probably. But I could think of 100 different ways to present the information that would be way more interesting than a paper. Couldn’t you?

And, of course, you know that I’ve launched Collab des Collines, a tour company offering both online and in-person experiences. Over the years, you’ve heard me talk about Benin, and now I’d be honored to take you there—virtually! On January 6, 2025, I’ll be leading an interactive, four-week online tour of Benin, where we’ll explore its rich culture, vibrant history, and daily life—all from the comfort of home…without the jet lag! ✈️😴

Here are the basics:

🗓️ Dates: January 6 – February 1, 2025 (we meet twice a week)

💻 Where: Online, so you can join from anywhere!

💰 Cost: $297

🎟️ There are only 7 spots left!

I even have a special offer where you can invite a friend at a reduced price—perfect for that one person who’s impossible to shop for! Or maybe you just watched the Netflix documentary Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy and are on the hunt for more meaningful gift options?

Anyhow, I am just very excited about my new adventures and that I have people to share the news with! So thank you for continuing to be a part of this community 🙂.

The weather here has Jack Frost visiting the last couple of nights - crisp mornings. I hope that all of you enjoy the beginning of the holiday season!

Stay warm!

Debra