Blog

As a wheelchair rider, special education teacher and avid traveler, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to travel to Washington, DC to speak to a group of 100 students from Russia.  The college-age students were about to return to Russia after completing a semester of study in a U.S. college/university.  These enthusiastic, intelligent, curious students had been selected for the highly competitive Year of Exchange in America (YEAR) Program which is administered by the Eurasia Foundation and funded by the U.S. State Department.

We are still learning about all the ways in which to internationalize. Recent changes to learning platforms and the possibilities of the virtual at my university have expanded our notion of access, although there is still much room to reimagine how we are doing things. As a faculty member whose work has always been international, but as someone who comes somewhat recently to disability, I’ve begun to reconsider how we think about what it means to internationalize.

In recent years, we at the National Clearinghouse on Disability and Exchange have been taking a closer look at how disability intersects with other identities in the context of international exchange experiences