As General George Patton famously noted, ‘Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash’.
I had quite deliberately remained in the teaching service throughout most of the 1970s, although I knew that there were other things I would want to do in time, in order to focus on having our four children and completing further study.
As chance would have it, while on that fourth short maternity leave after the birth of our daughter (following three sons), I received a call from the head office of the NSW Department of Education. Would I come in and have a discussion with them about a project they were planning? My name had been recommended to them as someone who might be able to provide them with some advice. They wanted to be able to capture a lot of the unpublished materials teachers were developing themselves, organise and make them available to others.
I realised about halfway through that this was a job interview. It was not a teaching role—it was creating a new information service from scratch, as the Department’s first Curriculum Information Officer.
There were a few challenges inherent in this scenario: first, encouraging teachers to share their material; second, putting them into a form that could be shared (whatever that meant); then, providing some sort of readily accessible listing so other teachers knew what was available.
This was at a time when computers were at their most rudimentary, with no such thing as the sort of databases and searching capabilities that are available today, or even by the mid-1980s. This was over fifteen years before the most embryonic form of the Internet.
I mark it as my first experience of considered (calculated) career risk taking.
Re-use, rejig and redeploy
I like new roles, ones that no one has done before, that you can sort of make up as you go along. But the risk is that you can’t really deliver what people are seeking, or you misjudge was that is.
I was able to employ a colleague to work with me, another teacher with graduate library qualifications whom I had met and thought would enjoy the challenge too. She was somewhat cautious.
I remember her asking me how we were going to figure this out. It was September and we were committed to delivering our product, whatever it was going to be, for the new school year in January.
My response was that I didn’t really know but it was important and there must be a way. We would figure it out together, engage some others in a few brainstorms and workshops—and we did.
In the end, we delivered what was needed and probably more than what was expected: a guide and index to hundreds of unpublished curriculum materials across the two pilot regions in NSW—one metropolitan and one rural. It meant trips to Dubbo and Orange and other places to get buy-in from teachers, principals and bureaucrats.
We solved the technical issues through that age-old approach of looking at who had done something like this before. Don’t re-invent—instead, re-use, rejig and redeploy.
Back then, the Australian Education Index was one of Australia’s first ‘databases’ providing access to a range of materials. We convinced the head of that service, Margaret Findlay, to include our data in that index. Margaret was very obliging and, in fact, thrilled that we were using what she had developed.
Our service was duly launched and did well over about a sixteen-month period. But then politicians started to hear about it—that you could actually find out what was happening in schools at the classroom level. In the end this was seen as rather subversive and the service came under threat.
I have learned many times that good ideas sometimes threaten the way things are usually done, so they might then go through a pause phase, before their real value is realised five or ten years later. This is what happened to the Curriculum Information Project in NSW. It became the approach used nationally about seven years later.
Inflection number two: Taking on a real leadership role
Around this time we were moving our family to Melbourne in order for Robert to take up a new job—one that I had seen advertised and thought he was just right for. I had figured that at some stage we would move to Melbourne, as that is where his family was and his father was not well. We met at a student conference when we were each involved in the Students’ Representative Councils – Robert in Melbourne at La Trobe University and me at Sydney. He had moved to Sydney to marry me but, for reasons I still find hard to fathom, he was not keen on Sydney’s humidity. While, initially, the timing was not great, in the end it worked out quite well as it seemed like the innovative Curriculum Information Project, despite its success ‘on the ground’, was about to be put on hold.
In Melbourne, after a few months of freelancing and part-time work, I joined the teaching staff as a lecturer at what became RMIT University’s Department of Information Services.
A few years later I was promoted to Senior Lecturer and, with the Head and my colleagues, led significant program and curriculum changes. We could see that components—and professional studies—of information, information technology, business information systems, library services and information management were starting to merge. Our programs needed rethinking and reworking—a task we accomplished with success.
Our Head of Department, Mike Ramsden, was made Acting Dean for about eighteen months. This was about the same time that we had started renewing our programs. And while he was Acting Dean, I became Acting Head of Department.
I realised that if I was going to stay in academia for a while, I really needed to get a PhD, even if they were still unusual in the field in which I was working at the time. Somehow, amongst everything else, I thought I could fit that in. After all, I expected Mike would eventually resume the role of Head of Department, which would lighten my load, and that suited me just fine.
I asked one of my contacts at the University of Melbourne for advice regarding my PhD studies. He steered me in the direction of Melbourne Business School (MBS), where I presented my case to the Dean. I was eventually accepted as a part-time student, though there was no one on staff then who really had a background in what I wanted to do.
I learned many years later that my contact at the University of Melbourne also happened to be Chair of the Academic Board at the time. When he rang the Dean there, the assumption was that it would be a very good idea to accept me. Sometimes you can get lucky!
The day I received my acceptance papers from MBS was the same day that the Head called me in the evening to say that he had finally agreed to accept the role of Dean. All of us in the Department knew what that meant—whenever you lost your Head, you were without one for about eighteen months while someone conducted a review to see if the department and its programs were really needed.
So, when you are at your lowest ebb, without the most senior person, and most understaffed, you also have a very heavy review burden. Again, it was one of those decision points: should I apply for the Head’s role when it became available in about a year’s time? What would this mean for the PhD about which I had become very enthusiastic?
I did get a lot of encouragement from some unusual quarters—people I didn’t know well who were keen for me to go for it and in the end I did. But first I decided I should hand over the Acting Head role to another likely internal candidate so he could have the opportunity to demonstrate his approach.
Meanwhile, I started planning a sabbatical, as the only way to kick-start my doctorate. After all I was a trained librarian so I knew how to do a literature search, and I would just have to figure out how to get things done over time.
I have given many workshops on how to do a PhD part-time when you have a lot of other things going on in your life. The secret is of course to outsource what you don’t have to do, both at home and in your research.
But I have probably dissuaded, rather than persuaded, many people from doing a PhD, especially in what was the arcane British/Australian model. What I always looked for in a PhD student is a real passion to investigate an area, someone who has a very good dose of discipline, and might have a supportive (enough) partner or environment. Completing a PhD is not essentially about being a