Whitehouse, H.L., and Balatti, J.M. (2001) Novice at forty: transformation or re-invention? In: Mercer, G., and Bartlett, A., (eds.) Postgraduate Research Supervision - Transforming (R)Elations. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, USA, pp. 43-53.

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Abstract

[Extract] This chapter is a short work of collective biography (Davies, 1 994,1997; Haug, 1987) undertaken on ourselves, doctoral students located within an education faculty in a regional university in tropical Australia. The collective narratives that form the bulk of the chapter began as emailed stories. Over a period of weeks, we overwrote each other's stories-melding, discarding, adding, reconstructing-to produce narrative fragments of mature-aged postgraduate experience. We wrote while still in the swampland of completing first drafts of doctoral theses. What we examine are some of the positionings we have had to negotiate to make ourselves up as competent postgraduate students within the regimes of academe and how we are making and re-making ourselves as academics in middle age and in mid-career. The story we tell is of two women, aged forty, who left established positions, Jo as manager of a financial planning business and Hilary as a research officer in the public sector, to return to full-time doctoral studies. We tell of the sense of dislocation we experienced as we moved from being "successful career women" to "students." We discuss how well and how badly we have negotiated the process of re-professionalisation as academics -in a system historically designed for the education of younger men and women and in an age where the less malleable "forty-plus" cohort are increasingly filling postgraduate places.

Item ID:	14329
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Research - B1)
ISBN:	978-0-8204-4998-2
Keywords:	postgraduate; research supervision
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2017 04:33
FoR Codes:	13 EDUCATION > 1399 Other Education > 139999 Education not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	93 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 9399 Other Education and Training > 939999 Education and Training not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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