Virtual Exchange and Global Learning for Disability Inclusion

Dr. Kelly Tzoumis, professor emeritus at DePaul University and lecturer at Johns Hopkins, discusses virtual exchange programs that make global learning accessible to students with disabilities. These innovative approaches embed intercultural experiences directly into curriculum, overcoming barriers of cost and physical accessibility while building crucial competencies.

• Virtual exchange goes beyond video calls—students are prepared to interact across cultures before meeting peers
• Less than 10% of students can afford traditional study abroad, making virtual exchange a more inclusive alternative 
• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide framework for global learning beyond just environmental topics
• Students develop empathy when working across language barriers with international peers
• Generational shifts in disability language reflect changing views of disability as identity
• Research shows virtual exchanges improve student mental health through developing resilience
• Students with disabilities demonstrate extraordinary capabilities when given appropriate accommodations
• Disclosure remains a major challenge in higher education—less than half of disabled students formally identify
• Creative accommodations should involve the learner as an active partner in finding solutions
• As world polarization increases, virtual exchange becomes even more vital for intercultural understanding

Find Dr. Tzoumis's book "Global Learning and the SDGs Through Virtual Exchange" through Springer Nature Press, with a follow-up focused on discipline-specific applications coming soon.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Global Learning
• 4:35 Virtual Exchange Explained
• 8:57 Making Global Learning Accessible
• 15:11 Language and Disability Identity
• 20:36 Student Success Stories
• 27:12 Disclosure Challenges in Higher Education
• 29:13 Creative Accommodations and Future Work

Transcript

Neilo Milliken: 0:01

Hello and welcome to AXS Chat. We're delighted to be joined today by Dr Kelly Tzoumis, who is a professor emeritus at DePaul University and also a lecturer at Johns Hopkins, and the focus of our talk today is going to be on global learning and bringing that into the disability space. So welcome, kelly, it's great to have you with us. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you've been doing of late?

Kelly Tzoumis: 0:27

Well, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be on your podcast. I am an emeritus professor at DePaul University in the School of Public Service and I've recently published a book on global learning, specifically how international interchanges, our virtual exchanges, can actually help us in learning about the SDGs and reaching globally, around the planet with bringing students together. So this is a technique that's been used. It started in education and languages and now we're using it, of course, after COVID worldwide virtual exchange to bring global learning experiences right into the classroom.

Neilo Milliken: 1:10

So for our audience, can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by virtual exchange? I'm assuming it's more than just a Zoom call.

Kelly Tzoumis: 1:19

Yes, yes, thank you for asking that. Yes, and it is not just distance learning or the use of just a technology. It's actually how we use intercultural competencies. We build them, these skills, with our students. So we prepare our students before they meet, and then there's a variety of ped, without the faculty member, to get to know each other after they're trained in the other culture, and then we do some assignments together, whether it's global virtual teams where they're building. You know, if you're in business, you're building product plans, you're building strategic plans.

Kelly Tzoumis: 1:59

Or in my courses I teach on the SDGs and I'm an environmental professor. In my courses, I teach on the SDGs and I'm an environmental professor, so we do role simulations and how to site a low-level nuclear waste site with all of the different actors and stakeholders, and so we do debates on nuclear waste. It's very dynamic. It's a very dynamic way and, most of all, it's an accessible way, meaning many of our students in fact less than 10% of our students can afford to do a study abroad. It's just not feasible. It costs, it's not feasible in time, work-life balance, and for those students with disabilities it is virtually impossible to navigate the rest of the world in a study abroad. So it opens it up. It's an inclusive way to get our students involved in meeting other students and working with other students abroad.

Neilo Milliken: 2:52

Excellent, and I think most of our audience know what the SDGs are. That's, the Sustainable Development Goals from the UN. A lot of people, obviously, when they hear the word sustainability, they immediately think about the environment, but there's lots of other elements in the SDGs as well. So disability, inclusion, decent work and all of these other elements that impact the disability and the health of people around the globe are included but often not necessarily explicitly talked about when people are discussing the SDGs. So is that an element that you bring into the work that you're doing and foster the understanding amongst your students that sustainability doesn't just equal the environment. There are all of these other social elements as well.

Kelly Tzoumis: 3:41

Yes, and that's one of the improvements, from the millennial goals that we used to have under the United Nations to the SDGs. It's poverty, it's race, it's gender, it's education, so it takes a very holistic look, not just environmental, but, of course, without clean drinking water, accessibility, clean air, so they're all definitely intertwined. And to answer your question, yes, we bring in the global South with our students. This is not just an approach of global learning among Western states. For instance, we work with Morocco, brazil, africa and also the indigenous tribes, particularly the Navajo Nation. So we get these students together from all of these different cultures and they have to communicate and work together on projects inside of the classroom. And what's wonderful about these global learning approaches using virtual exchanges? It doesn't impact their schedule of their curriculum, it does not impact cost. They don't have to take an additional semester or additional course.

Debra Ruh: 4:45

It's part inside of the curriculum and so that's really important, that embeddedness in their learning, particularly in their disciplinary courses that took place not far from university campus and we had a lot of university students coming in and then during the process they realized well, I should have learned more about this at university. So when you are bringing on board new students, what reactions do you get from them when you bring the topic forward?

Kelly Tzoumis: 5:23

You know, that's really, really a good question, and I've been teaching virtual exchange and global learning for about 10 years, and so there's a lot of tricks of the trade, and one of the things that I've seen is regarding my own students that focus on using the English language right now to communicate. Some of our American students get very put off that they have to struggle and be patient and show some empathy with understanding people from different languages who are not necessarily fully conversant in English. With the international student, I asked them to put themselves in the students' shoes, in that this is the global student speaking in a second or maybe third language and they have to act as communicating with native speakers, which is not easy. And so then my students start to realize the monumental task that the other students are accomplishing and they're almost in admiration that this can happen. So that's one of the big kind of empathy and learning about intercultural competencies is becoming a partner in the communication, not just a receiver.

Antonio Santos: 6:55

And that's a key thing that early on, the new students that come into these global exchanges learn. Something. That made me think about it and I love how you said partnering communications because, as you know, I'm also a fellow American and also thank you for getting up so early. You're joining us from California, so thank you so much for getting up so early to be on the show and I only learned English. I did try to learn Spanish and French and I'm not very good at it as a typical American, but at the same time, you had said something before we got on air. When you're talking about partnering the communications, I mean, I am so fascinated with AI and what that can do to improve communication, so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that. But you had also said something off air about language and identity of students living with disabilities and I thought that the audience might also find that conversation interesting to tie into what we're talking about, especially when we're talking about being a partner in communications.

Kelly Tzoumis: 7:55

Yes, and when you're speaking different languages, it becomes very clear that we have to help each other in understanding each other, because the language could become a barrier. What you first said, ai, is very true. Our students are not scared of AI. Our faculty may be scared of AI, but our students, I think, are going to be greatly benefited by the translation software that's going to come through AI. It's already here, so that I think language is going to become less of a barrier.

Kelly Tzoumis: 8:23

But certainly, when we talk about disabilities, which is the second part of what you mentioned there's my students. My college students have really opened my eyes in terms of. I grew up thinking you know person first, in terms of speech patterns, and I do continue to use that. However, my students come with hats and t-shirts saying disability is not a dirty word and they as part of their identity, which is now in our syllabus, with pronouns which we respect and will continue to respect, because they bring identity into their work and into their classroom. It's what they show up with and we can't be blind to that, just as we're not blind to race and other issues.

Kelly Tzoumis: 9:09

Disability is an identity and disability comes into how they want to define themselves in that identity. So they've asked us to respect and use disability first and not person first. So I often get corrected in the classroom and in even meeting notes when I type them up and to correct them. So it's very interesting. And so actually, while some students like myself older students may not want to have disability first, I am nimble enough that I can do both and I can do more than both, so that's something interesting.

Antonio Santos: 9:47

I would also say that and I applaud all the students and all the people that are working on their identity I just always hope that we leave room for others, because this might be how those students are responding, but there's a lot of other people responding in different ways all over the world. Are we social identity, medical model, all the identities? And I think we've got to leave room for everybody to be able to maybe decide it for themselves and society to be okay with that and to respect that. So that's one thing I love about the young people today. They do think about the world in a much different way than, say, somebody like me does. Even though I try to stay up on stuff, it's just impossible to. So I learn a lot from that generation.

Kelly Tzoumis: 10:32

And hopefully we have tolerance and patience with each other.

Neilo Milliken: 10:36

Yes, yes, yes. Does that suggest that younger generations don't have the same levels of tolerance or is it just an intolerance for a lack of understanding of the fact that people have these identities? I think that I also work in an international context and so I've walked through the the minefield of disability language, because we're in 70 countries and whatever language we use we're going to be upsetting people in some of the countries. So we built a language guide for English only because the official language of the company, despite being French, is English. But we have to advise people to understand people's preferences and advise people again that once people have stated their preference, you should be sticking with the individual preference. I think it's the sort of person first.

Neilo Milliken: 11:30

Stuff driven by the UN was driven out of consultation with disabled persons' organisation. But people's opinions vary around the world and they change with generation. So UK has often talked about disability and been scolded by people saying no, use person first. And I think that I spend a lot of time fudging things by saying this is John who is disabled. So you're still acknowledging someone's identity, clearly stating that they still have an identity as a person, as a name, because I think the preferences amongst the different groups are really hard. I do my best as an individual to try and respect people's preferences, but I also don't beat myself up too much when someone is scolding me, because I know that someone else is actually agreeing with me. It's almost impossible to get it right.

Kelly Tzoumis: 12:33

But that's just the point. I don't think we have to get it, quote, unquote right and the book actually. To get back to the book, that's what intercultural competency is is recognizing the different cultural differences and thank goodness we acknowledge the diversity now instead of having blinders to it.

Neilo Milliken: 12:53

Yeah, no, I think that's true, the sort of pearl clutching that we sometimes have when we see, as English language, disability specialists and accessibility specialists, when you still see handicap in French and fair behind in German, which is severely disadvantaged. You know there are still all of these classifications. You've got to sort of roll with it a little bit and understand the differences in the linguistics and the culture and everything else. So it's great that that's in the book and that's in your teachings. To dig a bit deeper into the work of the book, what are some of the key elements that you're finding or that you've written up about that really support that intercultural understanding?

Kelly Tzoumis: 13:48

Well, especially, I want to talk about the intercultural understanding of disability and how our students bring disability into global learning. Let me give you a couple of really profound examples, and they're in the book with my co-author, katie Holloway. We had a student, katie Holloway, and she's one of the co-authors, so I can use her name in this particular example, and she is quoted in there in the first person from her experiences. We were playing role games, game simulations, as I mentioned earlier, and we were citing offshore wind farms, which is a real problem in the United States and continues to be, but widely accepted overseas. And so each of these students were given a script and they were different roles, different stakeholders, which is really important for our students worldwide to understand, because these kinds of civic facilities, engineered facilities, have to go out to public and public acceptance. So, regardless of the country you're in and so we had students from Brazil and Morocco and the Netherlands in this particular game, and Italy, and I had several disabled students, but only I knew that because, as the professor, it's only disclosed to me Because, remember, this is a virtual exchange and so one of the students I had in there, katie Holloway, who attended some conferences with me to present these results as well as co-authored, had a terrible tragedy during the period of our 10-week quarter, terrible tragedy during the period of our 10-week quarter.

Kelly Tzoumis: 15:16

And it was in the middle of COVID, but the students had come back to the dormitories and she was in a dormitory as an undergraduate. Her father had passed from COVID and so in these little 10-week sessions which interruption is very difficult to recover from, okay, in a quarter system she had to go back for the funeral. Okay, back to her hometown and missed an entire week. And so she contacted me and, of course, and the university contacted me, and of course I said I'm going to waive this requirement. There's no way she could possibly come back. And she had signed up as a leader of the team. And I contacted her and I said listen, listen, I have, we can waive this out of your grade requirement. And she told me no, no, I want to do this. And I said okay, okay, okay. Pretty much the entire time I've been teaching these role-playing games.

Kelly Tzoumis: 16:23

That got a unanimous vote. And she wore a mask the whole time and sat in the student building where the students meet in a cubbyhole because the reception wasn't good in the dorms for the virtual exchange and she got unanimous. And then, if that, if that wasn't enough, she, the leader of the offshore wind farm, is considered the regulator, what we would call EPA in our country she voted against it. So she received unanimous votes from all the stakeholders, but voted against it because she felt the environmental justice stakeholder was being underrepresented and even though they agreed to the compromise, she could not. The partners and I were astounded because in fact, that's what we were one of the learning outcomes we were trying to get across in the course. And she came back and, like, hit the ball out of the park and my partners the various international partners I had in that game did not know she was disabled and could not discern that underneath her mask. Neither could the other students.

Neilo Milliken: 17:23

Yeah, and in this case, masking a disability is not a metaphor, not a metaphor. I work a lot in the sort of neurodivergent arena, right, working with people with autistic spectrum conditions and neurodivergent conditions, and we talk about masking a lot because we work in business and the way that we would perhaps feel more comfortable behaving is not the way that colleagues or customers would expect us to behave, so we actually mentally mask a lot, and so that's an area where I think that there's still a degree of lack of understanding about the amount of effort that it takes to mask and to fit into societal norms.

Neilo Milliken: 18:12

Yeah, maybe, as I get older, I care less about it, but it's still a significant drain on people's energy.

Kelly Tzoumis: 18:21

Yeah, my colleagues internationally had no idea because she had completely covered up from the COVID in the student center where she was sitting, and when I divulged to them, let's make her a co-author, and we brought her to Valencia. The university funded us to take her to Valencia to a conference where she received a standing ovation and it was the last session on the last day and I was afraid nobody was going to show up. She received a standing ovation from the entire room and lots of people showed up and it was again one of those transformative experiences for the student and for the Brazilian partner and I who attended with her. And so as co-author, when you read this chapter in the book, it's really moving because we had her take her discussion boards in the first person, which is often done in the disability academic literature. We encourage first-person writing, which we don't any other time, and she wrote in the first person from her discussion boards her experiences during that time and the impact of coming back to the university and leading this team and how it impacted her mental health. And we are.

Kelly Tzoumis: 19:32

I have done a couple other pieces of research, three other articles with colleagues on mental health and these global virtual exchanges and we have identified the pathway through which students psychologically benefit from using these global virtual exchanges on their mental health, and it's through resiliency, development of the KSAs and well-being. It improves their well-being by working with others outside of the USAs. And well-being it improves their well-being by working with others outside of the US. And so I'm really happy to use these global virtual teams in our pedagogy because I know it's having a really important impact on the well-being of our students.

Neilo Milliken: 20:13

Can I just ask you to explain KSA to our audience?

Kelly Tzoumis: 20:16

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Knowledge, skills and abilities. It's widely used in the workplace in terms of position descriptions.

Debra Ruh: 20:28

Yes, antonio, I know you've got a question. Find a way to get some lessons from that experience that you're telling us. What are the most common misconceptions or assumptions about disability that you have encountered in higher education and how can we address them?

Kelly Tzoumis: 20:48

That is a wonderful question and a huge question. Well, of course, if I am from the disability community, and one of the big things is disclosure, if I am from the disability community and one of the big things is disclosure, and so it's very difficult to come out as disabled, because you know the discrimination and the judgments that come along with that, a long history of that and, as a female professor, I've already gotten problems with my wage depression, which is well known. And now I'm going to add another discriminatory category disabled on top of that. So I didn't disclose for a very long time. I've been in the disability world 10 years. I graduated into it, I was not born into it and so I know that.

Kelly Tzoumis: 21:30

For faculty, I created an employee resource group at DePaul, with DePaul's support in fact, and employees, students, faculty staff do not want to disclose, and so that's the biggest problem that we have, because when you don't disclose, we can't report that back and create programs, justified programs and expenditures for disabled people in the university. So that's the biggest thing. And, secondarily, our students are actually better. Our students are flocking to the center of student disabilities and seeking resources, which is putting a big pressure on universities. However, I just was working with these statistics yesterday less than half still disclose who have the disability in terms of our college students. So even though it's better than perhaps when I grew up or how I feel about it because of my growing up training on disability, our students are better about it but they're still not getting the resources that they need because less than half actually disclose and disability is growing. It's growing on campus partly because we changed the definitions and partly because this generation feels a little bit more.

Neilo Milliken: 22:48

When we were looking at disclosure or self-ID. We talk about the trust gap, and there is a really significant trust gap between those who formally disclose and those that informally disclose other indicators of this without compromising on people's privacy or forcing them to disclose. So some of the things that we're doing now is looking at anonymous use of accessibility features, because we're a tech company, we can do monitoring and stuff like that, and so what that then shows you is that there are far, far more people using the features than ever disclosed Now. Many of them may not even consider themselves to be disabled or to have a long-term health condition. A lot of, a lot of the very basic features magnification, um, larger fonts are just what people think.

Neilo Milliken: 24:04

I'm getting older, right, but without these it becomes harder to read. At some point it might become impossible to read without them. It's getting harder each day to do without them. So if we didn't have glasses, then maybe, maybe, I would have a visual impairment rather than just a short sight. So I think that having some of those other metrics and indicators is useful for being able to inform the decision makers and budget holders in management that this is a larger cohort than the tiny sample that are brave enough to formally disclose in their HR system.

Neilo Milliken: 24:48

So I think there was another one of our favorite guests. Nick Nash from Purple Space, wrote a book another author that we really like uh, secrets and big news, which was all about people disclosing their disability and the barriers to wanting to do that and the reasons why it can have benefits and why it might not. But that was 15 years ago and we're still, despite all of that, not in a position where everyone feels comfortable to do so. So I think there's plenty of work yet to be done. So, before I close, is there anything final that you'd like to share with the audience about your work, or where we can find you or where people can find your book?

Kelly Tzoumis: 25:35

Yes, and may I, if you will permit, I want to give you another example of global learning and how we can integrate disability accommodations.

Kelly Tzoumis: 25:45

This also is very interesting and shorter than the first example into the environment in which I'm talking about overseas. And so I was teaching with a partner in Athens on remediation. I was a former Superfund manager here in the United States cleaning up radioactive waste, and so my partner in Athens is an architect and she was looking at remediating and revitalizing ancient lands, and so we partnered up and I used augmented virtual reality with affordable goggles and YouTube. Well, as a disabled professor, I do have disabled students seeking out my classes because I do accommodate easily, and I had a blind student in that class. And so again the university contacted me and the student contacted me and I said I will wait. Again, I said I couldn't figure out a way how I could deal with this, and so I said let me waive this because this is really unreasonable for you to complete this assignment. And once again the student said no and I said okay, what do you want to do? And they said the university went and hired a clinician who looked at the 360 goggle drone footage and virtual reality footage and sat with the student, and the clinician answered all of the questions of what they were seeing in the 360 looking around, and then the student answered the prompts that were required. So I just want to say before I close that it's really important that we think creatively about accommodations in global learning and any type of learning that we do. Incorporating the learner into solving the accommodation is key, instead of forcing the accommodation on top of either the employee, the staff, the faculty member or the learner, and so I view the learner as somebody that partners with me so that I can get those learning outcomes to that learner.

Kelly Tzoumis: 27:53

Now, as far as the book, the book is available at Springer Nature Press and I can certainly give you those online links to purchase the book. And I'm not necessarily getting I get no royalties from the book, so I'm not promoting something that I totally benefit from, and I am retired, so I do research now at my leisure because I enjoy it. We are looks like we are going to come out with a second book. It's being proposed right now. I've met with the editor last week. This one is even bigger and it includes 260 authors and 112 chapters. It will be two volumes and we have podcasts on the current book that's out on the SDGs. This new book will also have podcasts, but it will focus on the discipline.

Kelly Tzoumis: 28:41

So you know, a lot of people say we can't possibly do global learning and virtual exchanges in law, in law school or engineering or in maritime disciplines. Of course you can and of course we do, and so we have medical doctors, we have lawyers, we have engineers, we have theater. We're doing it in theater, we're doing it in theater, we're doing it in music.

Kelly Tzoumis: 29:01

So the really important point of all this is we're getting more and more polarized in our world order right now. It's going to become harder, in the current polarization, to get students to learn about others unlike themselves, whether it's disabilities, whether it's race or whether it's different nations and cultures, study abroad, migration into other countries for field trips it's getting harder, and so we still have to have those intercultural skills. We need to build them into our college learners, and so virtual exchange does this, and the current book talks about SDGs. It's 18 chapters, it's about 36 authors coming together, partners. The new book is even bigger and we're going to go into discipline. So, in other words, learning globally is not a global studies course just in the general eds. You have to carry that through into the upper level courses and into graduate schools and professional schools, and so we show how that can be done in the second book that is on its way into production.

Neilo Milliken: 30:13

Fantastic. Thank you so much, kelly, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. Apologies, I had set my do not disturb for on the hour and we've overflowed a little bit and so someone was trying to ring me. I hope we can get rid of the ringtone on the last bit of the podcast. I need to thank Amazon and MyClearTips for keeping us on air and keeping us captioned. So thank you very much and look forward to continuing this conversation on social media.

Kelly Tzoumis: 30:40

Thank you so much.