Avenging Betty: Reflections of a Deakin (post)graduate

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    Abstract

    I graduated from Deakin in 1995, and left for good in 1996. That was all, but I still remember it clearly and warmly, as a major formative experience for me, academically and otherwise. I spent four years there, in Geelong, as a postgraduate student, and I took from it far more than my research qualification. I arrived having completed recent undergraduate study by distance education, and with experience of working in two other universities as a casual tutor. I knew many of the staff through their writing, and was in awe of them ' an acolyte come to drink at the fountain of knowledge, and make myself over into an academic. That is, I wasn't (yet) an academic, I was a teacher. I was a practitioner, not a 'theorist' ' as I saw it, an intuitive thinker rather than a scholar ' and moreover already thirty-eight, and an adult with three small children. My teacherly credentials meant that I was anxious about my chances of making the grade in this new phase of my life. Looking back now, I see that the pathway bringing me to those white wooden buildings in the paddock on a Geelong hillside in 1991, had been found twenty-five years earlier, in a way that probably could not have taken me anywhere else. I was the Good Subject of socially critical theory, a working-class girl with a social conscience, liberated by my radical feminist sisters early in the 70s, with hairy legs and henna. As I see it now, I had long been conscientised, and that made me very amenable to being at Deakin, as an acknowledged and exemplary site of social justice in education.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationEducation, social justice and the legacy of Deakin University
    Subtitle of host publicationReflections of the Deakin diaspora
    EditorsRichard Tinning, Karen Sirna
    Place of PublicationRotterdam, The Netherlands
    PublisherSense Publishers
    Chapter11
    Pages135-146
    Number of pages12
    Volume76
    ISBN (Electronic)9789460916397
    ISBN (Print)9789460916373
    Publication statusPublished - 2011

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