Episode 6 - From Rural Roots to Global Classrooms: A Conversation with Dr. Modjadji Choshi

Welcome back to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, where we explore the experiences, challenges, and strategies of dedicated educators. In this episode, host Dr. Eric Magrum speaks with Dr. Modjadji Choshi, Associate Professor of Nursing at James Madison University, about her inspiring journey from a remote village in South Africa to becoming a globally experienced nurse educator.   

In this episode, Dr. Choshi shares:  

- Her clinical and academic path through South Africa, Ireland, and the U.S.   

- Insights from her PhD research on self-care among rural women post-coronary intervention   

- The value of empowering nursing students and staying current with industry advancements   

- How she creates supportive, student-centered learning environments   

- The transformative impact of her South Africa study abroad program on cultural competence and hands-on learning   

Dr. Choshi’s story is a powerful reminder of the global dimensions of healthcare education and the role educators play in shaping compassionate, culturally competent practitioners.   

Tune in for an engaging conversation on nursing, mentorship, and the future of community-based learning.  

Transcript

“Being a nurse is not a job where you do a task and you accomplish a task and you're done. It's a calling. Even if she was not an educator working in academia, she was an educator working at bedside nursing.

And I told myself, when I grow up, I want to be able to inspire other nurses like she has. Protect your energy, you have energy, you have the passion. The passion that you have will carry you through.

Welcome to CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, an outlet created for continuous learning and actionable insights for faculty. I'm your host, Eric Magrum, inviting you to join us in conversation with dedicated educators who share their experiences, challenges and effective solutions. Today, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Modjadji Choshi, an associate professor within the School of Nursing here at James Madison University.

Welcome Modjadji and thank you for being with us today.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Eric.

Modjadji, could you walk us through your journey as an educator, how it all began and what brought you here today?

Okay. Do you have all day?

Yes, I do.

All right. Okay. So Eric, it's all started in the remote village of Marui in Limpopo Province in South Africa.

From that came an innovative community engagement teacher-scholar professional you see here today. My journey as an educator started with a strong foundation in nursing. I end my diploma in nursing in South Africa.

That was a four-year diploma where you get a general nursing community psychiatry and midwifery. Over the years, I gained extensive clinical experience in South Africa, Ireland, and the United States. I obtained my PhD in nursing from the University of Arizona in 2017, where I focused on self-care behaviors of rural women post-inversive coronary interventions, that means open-heart surgery or stent placement.

So this blend of clinical practice and academic research fueled my passion for teaching, advocating, and mentoring the next generation of nurses, Eric. And I love my job for that. I joined JMU School of Nursing as an assistant professor in 2018.

I have since progressed to be an associate professor. Three significant milestones in my career that I can bring up to you, just to highlight why I like my job and how I do what I do, is the first one is I did teach a transdisciplinary medical innovation course in the JMU xLab. I taught a policy institute in the summer of 2023, and I conducted a successful study abroad program in South Africa, all of which provided invaluable experiential learning opportunities and deepened my commitment to global health and education.

My journey signifies perseverance, resilience, and the power of positivity. I'll leave you at that for now.

Yeah, very well spoken. So, one thing, my mother was a nurse. And one thing I find with nurses is they're always super passionate about nursing and helping other people.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

So, being a nurse is not a job where you do a task and you accomplish a task and you're done. It's a calling. I could speak to myself and tell you, when you're a nurse, you are an educator, you are a leader, you are a healer.

That's why we have something we call mother nature, not father nature, right? Most of the nurses are women. We're trying to work on that, but most nurses are nurses.

Their passion is from within to outside. By the time I get to bedside, by the time I get to teach the students inside, I'm already boiling with passion to make a difference and to make an impact, and a broader impact on communities and on the students.

In your view, what does it mean to excel in your role?

To excel as an educator from a nursing perspective and from an advocacy, advocacy and impactful person is to inspire and empower students to reach the full potential. It also, from an educator perspective, include staying current with the latest advancements in nursing education for evidence-based practice, integrating innovative teaching methods and fostering a supportive and inclusive learning environment for our students. For myself, as a community engagement teacher scholar, excellence also means contributing to the field through research, scholarship, and engaging in continuous professional development.

I take students to clinicals. During these clinicals, the students engage with communities locally and globally, which exemplifies this commitment to excellence. These community engagements provide students with hands-on experience in distinctly different health care settings, enhancing their cultural competence, clinical and critical thinking skills.

It is really important to excel as a nurse.

So you talked about inspiring and empowering students. Is there somebody who particularly inspired or empowered you as an educator when you were a student?

Yes. I would say someone who empowered me. That happened before I was even an educator.

When I was a nurse, a student nurse going through the diploma in South Africa. This person was an idol for us as students. Their high level of performance, the quality of care that she provided, the support she gave to us to say, you got to do it, you got to do it, got to do it.

Everybody started somewhere. Nobody was born a nurse knowing what to do. Everybody learned, everybody started somewhere, and everybody learns differently.

You just have to do it. And then that's how I do it.

So she was, she was essentially a model or an ideal almost that you were aspiring to be. Is that correct?

That is correct. She was an ideal nurse that was meant to be. Even if she was not an educator working in academia, she was an educator working at bedside nursing.

And I told myself, when I grow up, I want to be able to inspire other nurses like she has.

Was there anything that she, she did that you can, that you try to pass on to your students?

It is your story, stick to it. If you don't know, ask. Do not ever pretend you, you know, because the minute you pretend that you know, you're compromising the safety of the patients, because you're not here for you.

You're here for the patient. I think what is most important is to understand that people come to the hospital, they put their lives in our hands, they entrust us to say, here, I have a problem. I trust that you will take care of me and let me go back home to my family or to my parents.

It's not supposed to be about us. It's supposed to be about providing safe and quality patient care. I think that's what is important.

What unique qualities or perspectives do you bring to your role as an educator?

I already talked about my passion. Absolutely.

Which is very evident.

Thank you. I bring a unique blend of international clinical experience and academic expertise. My background in diverse healthcare settings across different countries allows me to offer a global perspective on nursing and healthcare.

Additionally, my research on self-care behaviors and health disparities provides valuable insights into addressing the needs of the underserved populations. My commitment to health equity is reflected in my teaching, my research, and my service activities. The size where I take my students to within the communities highlights my dedication to providing transformative learning experiences that broaden their understanding of global health issues with hands-on experience addressing challenges that our community identified, collaborating with community members to address those issues.

So you talked about the international perspective. My guess is your time in Africa really helped you bring that here to JMU students and allow them to see things in the way that they've never seen them before. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yes, I can talk about that. That's exactly what I want to talk about most. When I left South Africa in 2000, I went to Ireland, Dublin, Ireland.

I worked in Dublin, Ireland for five years before coming to United States. I came to the United States and I worked and I got my PhD. So my background from South Africa, the healthcare systems, I tried to share those experiences with my students in the classroom.

I tried to bring that in the classroom. I, when I teach, I always give them scenarios about experiences that I've had, about patient scenarios that I have experienced, about experiences outside of healthcare that can impact people's lives and people's health. The social determinants of health, for instance, they are things that impact people outside of the medical that could make people sick.

They are global. In Ireland, there are different aspects that impact people to get sick. In South Africa, there are different aspects that impact people to be sick.

In the United States, there are different aspects that impact people's health. So bringing those different perspectives into the classroom during clinical impact students' learning and allow them to be open-minded in that regard. And one thing that I also want to, which is one of the highlights of my career, is that I took the students on a study abroad to South Africa the past winter.

I took them to the village that I was born in South Africa. So that's how passionate about, and I have no shame in showing people where I grew up and then where I am now. And then that is inspiring to me to be a role model to the students and a role model to the people in South Africa that I grew up with and those that look up to me.

That's my international experience.

So that you took students back to South Africa where you grew up, that must have been a truly full circle moment.

Huge. Big, big, big.

It's something that I'm really proud of. And I think the students that I took, they were really appreciative of me bringing them there. And I almost didn't do it.

Wow.

Yeah.

That would be such a transformative experience, learning and seeing, going and visiting where you can't, I just, I think that's phenomenal. So to this point in your career, what are you most proud of?

I am proud, there are a few things that I'm really proud of that I could talk about here. Some of them I have related to.

My contribution to the nursing education and my efforts to address the health disparities through my research. My work integrating the social determinants of health into the nursing education, and the research on the preventive practices for cardiovascular disease among rural black women, including the United States and in South Africa. Those are particularly impactful.

I really wanted to highlight that I'm really proud of my collaborative efforts, because I always tell people that you cannot solve complex issues in silos. The transdisciplinary course that I taught in the X Lab, the task force that I led in the School of Nursing for capacity building in South Africa, those are the most moment that I'm really proud of, because the study abroad that I ran was best from the collaborative and transform it and the capacity building relationship that I had with the village where I was born.

And the ability to provide students with unique opportunities, where they engage with communities that, international communities or local communities, that they would have never had an opportunity to engage with. Some of the students that I took now, they are fourth semester students, they are graduating in the semester. They were so grateful that they had that opportunity to go and experience South Africa by someone who is from South Africa, and took them to the villages that most travelers, most tourists could not take them, could not go.

That really makes me so proud that the students were able to see when I talk about the social determinants of health in class, that these are real things. These are not imaginary concepts.

Additionally, something that I'm really proud of is that with the Health Policy Institute, there were students that came from South Africa in the summer of 2024, 2024 I think, yeah. In summer 2024, they came from Stellenbosch and they came here to do the health policy. We took them to Capitol Hill to see how policies are developed and implemented in the United States.

And when they got here, they found me. They're like, huh, you are from South Africa? Yep, I'm from South Africa.

I went through the same program that you're going through. This is where I am. This is how you can make an impact.

You make an impact and then you look back and like, huh, I'm really proud that I did that. There are several proud moments that I can talk about, but I'm going to just talk about this few for now. Yes.

So, I want to come back to social determinants of health, specifically the social determinants of health in South Africa versus those in the United States. And not getting too much into the weeds, but so could you provide maybe one or two examples of how they're vastly different in South Africa than in the United States so that listeners can have an idea?

In South Africa, we have, I can give an example of rural living, for instance, you know, access to food, economic stability, or access to basic needs like water. And here in the United States, even if you go to a rural neighborhood, you will find that they have access to water. They can open a tap.

They can do that. Even if they don't have as easy access as the Ebbun, there isn't a huge gap between the difference in rural, in terms of water. I'm just talking about water.

There's other things that are really different between Ebbun and rural in the United States in terms of water. However, when you go to South Africa, you talk about access to basic stuff like water. There's a huge gap between the Ebbun and the rural.

The rural community that we engaged with when we went on a study abroad, they did not have water. When the students got there, they did not have water for about three weeks. The minute the student rolling into the village, they started talking to the people, all they could tell the people that we don't have water.

We don't have water. Those are some of the differences that the students were like, you don't have water? What?

What? What is it? What?

You don't have water? The distance from town where they buy food, where they go to buy food, access to food. We talk about food desert.

They is about maybe 30 miles from town, but because of the road, it took us an hour to get to that town. Because of that road, because there was raining season, there was road damage, because it's a rural road. So that's a big difference.

The students were like, it's 30 miles, but it took us, why does it take, it takes about maybe 30 minutes? No, that's the difference. Economic stability, jobs, people in that village have college degrees, but they don't have jobs.

So they don't have economic stability. They do have education, but they don't have the economic stability where they can support themselves and be able to afford health insurance and be able to access health and access and help the children get quality education. So those are a few differences that the students were able to see that are distinct, that I didn't even have to tell them.

So what was the experience like for you watching the student figure that out?

It was a little bit emotional for me because the people that the students were engaging with are my people. Some of them I grew up with, some of them I went to school with. But it was kind of sort of self-fulfilling because the students, even if it was a reciprocal relationship between the students and the community, because the students are learning, the community are also learning.

So the students were really role models to some of the students in the village. They were able to go to what we call a primary school here, you call it elementary, and then a primary school and a high school, and communicate with the, and talk to the children in the schools. So you can see that they were creating relationships, communicating that we are all people, we breathe the same air, we go to the bathroom, we eat, we do the same things.

But the access to the resources could impact us differently, and impact how we do things.

I can only imagine how powerful that was for you to witness that.

Yes, it was really life changing for me.

So switching gears a little, what drives you to continue growing and thriving in your role?

There's a lot of things that drives me, like the experience that I just explained. When I first left, when I was prepping, like I said, I've been trying to do it in the counseling. When I left, I said, I'm not doing this again.

This is the first and this is the last, right? But going there, witnessing the transformation that the students had, the relationships that the students build with the community, the benefits, the impact that the students had on the community and the community had on the students, really like, what are you talking about when you say you can't do this again? Are you going to cut this?

This is not about me. Remember what I talked about? When you take care of people, it's not about you.

As a nurse, the passion is from inside out. It's not about me. I'm here to impact people.

I'm here to have a broader impact and be the change that I tell the students to be.

It's an incredibly selfless profession.

Totally.

You have to put others first. Yep. So having to put others first, how do you go about balancing your personal life with your faculty responsibilities?

I have to be honest with you with this. It's not an easy thing to do. Like when you are a nurse, it's not about only being a nurse.

It's about your passion. It's about the overall impact that you do. You really have to.

You must have something that you do that has got nothing to do with work. You must. I do enjoy reading.

I travel a lot. I hike and go running with my dog, Jaco, which really provides me with some fun. I have a conversation with my dog.

We can talk for about 15 minutes.

He talks back or she talks back?

Sometimes. Sometimes he can talk back, I think, you know. I think he thinks he's a person.

So, traveling enriches my understanding of different cultures and healthcare system, which I bring into the classroom. So, also during the summer, I work as a travel nurse that also helps breaking out the monitoring of teaching. And then, as a worker, I select states that I have never been to before, so that I can explore the trails and explore areas around it.

So, that also helps me as part of my travel as a nurse. Even if I work and make income, I still do traveling and really not do anything to do with teaching. Just also that traveling as a nurse also helps me to be up to standard with the evolving healthcare and medical system.

The technology, the AI that is going on now. So, I have to be able to be up to standard. When I come back to class, I know what is happening in the healthcare system.

That helps me a lot as well to keep going. I read different books. I also, I'm now currently reading a book called The Power of Now, A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Totally HR.

And then I also, I read two books at the same time. So, you know, because it depends on how I feel. If I feel like I really need to read or something needs to deal with my emotions, then I'll read a different book.

If I just want to read and just relax for the day, then I will read a different book. So, I'll read this one. And then I also, I'm reading Centennial by James Mishner.

I love those. I love reading. So, sometimes I can pick up a book and read it and I don't sleep.

If it's a Friday, I pick it up on Friday, I don't sleep until Sunday morning because I need to finish the book.

Holy smokes. So that, those are your hobbies.

Those are my hobbies. Yeah.

And you've covered how those sort of bring fresh insights along with your dog, Jocko. What kind of dog is Jocko?

He's a Lab Mix.

Lab Mix. And does your dog travel with you?

Oh, yeah. Okay.

I think the listeners really wanted to know, because I was thinking as a dog lover and a cat lover, I was thinking, wait, does the dog go with you?

Oh, yeah. This is my co-pilot. Every time I'm driving and then there will be traffic coming in, because he sits in the back.

He will come in and I'll hear his head on my right shoulder. And then I'll say, okay, what's going on? Then, okay, maybe I'm falling asleep.

Maybe I should be up. And then I'll be, okay, something is coming. Maybe then when we come somewhere, I don't know.

Dogs have a sense of somehow that, oh, there's a car on the other side of the road. Good. And then he'll go back and sleep.

They're amazing animals, aren't they?

I love my dog.

They are amazing animals.

Very much amazing, yes.

Do you have any strategies that you use to ensure that your personal life and faculty responsibilities don't overwhelm one another?

I have some principles that I live by to help me to prevent this overwhelm, because it can. It can really be overwhelming. Eric, because when I came to JMU, I came straight from clinical practice, and then there's this thing that they call tenure.

You know what I mean? You have to get tenure, and then you are on a time crunch. So that could be overwhelming sometimes because you got to get all this, you have the checkboxes that you have to do.

I always tell myself, you have to pause. Pause before you react to anything, because emotions are just information that needs to be processed before you can do something or say something. Just pause and wait.

Ask questions, don't assume, you know, that way you are not over thinking things, thinking that this is what it is. Then you get over one, because maybe that is not even what it is, you know. Ask questions, clarify if you don't understand something.

And I think the most important thing about being an educator, a nurse, a mother, and someone that my family look up to, is to be able to own up to my mistakes and say, if I did something wrong, I say, oh, I'm, I'm sorry, I think I did, this is, I was wrong here. That's a, for me, that's a sign of maturity, because sometimes people don't want to be wrong, they want to be all right all the time. That, that's not a way of living, because it's, you're not supposed to strive for perfection.

You're supposed to strive for good, of being good, you know. And like one of the books that I was reading, small steps, those small steps could lead to bigger, bigger achievements and bigger wins. Also, what I do is, which I have already talked about is, I encourage and support those around me.

And I'm advocate, I mentor, I support, and I bring positive energy where I have to, to be able to impact people. And lastly, what I do is, I'm grateful. I'm very, very grateful for who I am, from, for things like being able to get up in the morning and come to work, for things like I have a son who is healthy, who is working.

I have my dog, which loves me unconditionally, who would bark, who would kill for me. And I'm really, really grateful for my life. And I love my job.

That's one thing I have to say. That helps me.

So if you could go back in time and meet yourself before your first day at JMU, what advice would you give and why?

Run away. He said, it's a scam. I'm kidding.

I'm just kidding. I'm telling you, I came to JMU straight from clinical practice as a travel nurse for some years. I work in the cath lab where we do procedures like cardiovascular coronary interventions, where we do stands, where we deal with life-threatening conditions.

People come in, they're having a heart attack in layman's terms, that you have to fix it now. You cannot wait. You have a time limit of 30 minutes.

The person has to be fixed or do something to make sure whatever the problem that brought that person here is fixed or something. You're working to us fixing that. That is high pressure work environment.

So I came to JMU and then they say, okay, you got to teach this class, you got to teach this class. Okay. I'm like, okay, let's go, let's go people.

Let's go. I got this. Let's go, let's go.

Okay, calm down. Calm down. There's nobody's having a heart attack.

Nobody is dying now. Calm down. You just have to be able to teach a class, be able to instill whatever passion you have, whatever energy you have, you have to instill into the students.

So if I have to go back and talk to myself, I will tell myself, you will be okay. You will be okay. Protect your energy.

Protect your energy. You have energy. You have the passion.

The passion that you have will carry you through. Just relax. Embrace every opportunity that you can for growth and collaboration, because I like feedback.

I live by feedback. I like collaboration. I like working with people.

So that, I would tell myself, those things will come. You have a passion. You have a way of showing your passion.

The right people that will collaborate with you to make this impactful experiences for the students will come.

Well, thank you very much, Modjadji.

You are welcome.

It's been a pleasure speaking with you today.

I appreciate it. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you.