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 language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Education, social justice and the legacy of Deakin University |
Subtitle of host publication | Reflections of the Deakin diaspora |
Editors | Richard Tinning, Karen Sirna |
Place of Publication | Rotterdam, The Netherlands |
Publisher | Sense Publishers |
Chapter | 11 |
Pages | 135-146 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Volume | 76 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789460916397 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789460916373 |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |