Making the Best of Life (Paperback)

This book explores how one group of aged women spoke of themselves as learners across their life span. The nine women who made up the group were born in the first quarter of the twentieth century, had generally limited formal education and spent most of their lives in Australia. In their life times they experienced world war, economic depression and family crisis as well as periods of apparent stability and peace, and across these eras they have been exposed to a range of discourses that impacted on their understanding of themselves as women and as learners. Their stories show us how this group drew on the discourses available to them in an enabling and empowering way in a time when women were typically seen as 'just a wife and mother'. By showing these personal narratives as socially shared, dialectically created, culturally embedded and personally mediated, our understandings of learning and development are enriched. These women's stories make visible the places, spaces and processes of life-long and life-wide learning.