After decades of study, I came to appreciate that my way of being was something I call “living practice” (McCormack, 2001). I describe this as living a life that exists within a web of interconnected spaces with lines between the spaces that can be difficult to see. I understood the role of research was to expose the web that gives meaning to one’s life. As such, the act of research was a quest for personal growth in which as a researcher I was able to find my personal and professional self by reflecting on and writing my life’s story.

This process of personal growth proved to be an enduring project that synthesised my many past and present selves. The practices that shaped my life came from three interconnected spaces- work, leisure and postgraduate research. My interest in leisure arose from the observation that as a mother and student I didn’t seem to have any time for it. Reflecting on this more deeply, I realised that talking about leisure revealed the time and space where tensions are experienced most acutely. Work and study are less open for personal interpretation. Leisure is where we experience life’s contingencies, unforeseen events, moments of serendipity, strangeness, contradictions or confusion.

Along life’s journey I was able to construct and reconstruct my identity many times. At different periods of my life I have been a draftsperson, geographer, teacher, town planner, aerobics instructor, researcher, and sports administrator. It was a love of geography that brought me to Canberra’s teacher’s college in 1973. Like many of my generation the serendipity of a free education coincided with a love of learning and a desire to find out why landforms looked the way they do. I completed a Diploma of Education along with my Bachelor of Arts before going on to teach geography in secondary schools.

The joy of teaching did not diminish my desire to be an urban planner. I wanted to learn how to integrate natural landscapes into planning our urban communities and commenced Urban and Regional Planning course as a mature aged student at University of New England finishing in time for my first daughter to be born in 1981.

Balancing work and study was my lifelong love of sport. I had found through personal experience that sport opened opportunities for girls and women. I spent nearly ten years living overseas experiencing the places I had read about in my geography textbooks. Leisure and sport are central activities in an expat’s world, and squash and tennis provided important recreation while living away from family and friends.

It was my interest in children's sport that brought me back into the workforce. I had had a taste of research in my honours year of my Bachelor of Arts at Australian National University. While studying to become an accredited fitness instructor I questioned what it meant for women to have leisure pursuits. I experienced leisure as a contradiction and tension in my own life, unlike how leisure being described in leisure studies research.

Inspired by feminist researchers I wanted to introduce a women’s perspective to the field. I interviewed women about their experiences of leisure and found that they did not have the words to describe their experiences. I turned to memory-work to bridge the gap– collecting and analysing written memories of everyday experiences of leisure. I formed a memory writing group that met regularly to write leisure-related memories of events triggered by reflecting on a set of key words related to women’s experiences of leisure. Individual memories were examined collectively guided by my use of multiple lenses of analysis. An important insight we learned was that the process of constructing meanings from the memory was more important than whether the memory accurately represented past events.

My transition from educator to academic was largely accidental. Shortly after completing my Masters research at the University of Canberra, I joining Centre for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching and Scholarship (CELTS) in 1996. I saw this as an opportunity to bring together two important parts of my life– my teaching and my research. It was not long after joining CELTS that I meet Robert Kennelly, a casual academic at the time who came to see me about unit evaluations. It was my responsibility to help academics construct evaluation questionnaires for their units of study.

As well as helping academics, I understood that being an academic I needed to be research-led and I was expected to continue to do independent research. I enrolled in a PhD program soon after finishing my Masters thesis and began exploring the experiences of leisure by women academics during their time as postgraduate research students. I had the somewhat naïve belief that I could learn how to successfully complete a PhD by interviewing women who had survived the process. Through the analysis of individual narratives about experiences of managing leisure I learned a lot about the PhD process but realised I still had to learn how to put what I had learned into my own practice.

It was here that I discovered writing as a tool for thinking. Writing stories about their experiences gives authors permission to move outside expected conventions to describe an event rather than feel a need to interpret and justify outcomes. Writing also provides a record for later analysis by looking back on issues raised by what and how we write about events.

This insight into the power of writing narratives was critical in helping the inaugural HERDSA Fellowship group develop its processes of reflection. The first group of volunteers was divided into triads in the belief that triad members could support each other through the reflection process. When Robert Kennelly’s group struggled to make progress, it was suggested that I would be an ideal mentor, and I pushed the triad to make their reflections much more rigorous. The result was that Robert was among the first HERDSA Fellows being conferred in Christchurch in 2003.

Robert and I would continue to meet from time to time after that successful collaboration and we discussed the need for a safe place and a safe space for teachers to come together and talk about teaching and learning. I managed to find a small amount of money and Robert persuaded the HERDSA Executive to match the funding to support HERDSA members attending meetings in the Australian Capital Territory. The idea of Talking About Teaching And Learning (TATAL) was to provide a safe place for passionate teachers to come together into a collaborative group and reflect on their teaching and their students learning. There were to be no assessments, judgements or even feedback. Just quiet listening, questions of clarification, and insights.

TATAL combined insights from my PhD research with Robert’s experience of being mentored for the HERDSA Fellowship. The model was gradually refined, evaluated and disseminated to include insights on reflective practice described by Dieter Schonwetter. TATAL meetings went on to become a regular feature of HERDSA conferences from 2011 onwards, spawning a group of TATALers dedicated to the value of sharing stories of teaching and learning in a non-judgemental setting.

From its inception in 2008 we have been through more than two dozen TATALs affecting the lives of more than 500 TATAL attendees, to 24 HERDSA Fellows, more than two dozen articles, and now preparations for the 14th HERDSA TATAL in Perth in 2025. In 2026, the TATAL program will again go beyond its bounds for a second time to Singapore (Hong Kong in 2014). During this TATAL period I have been lead author or mentoring a lead author in seven major pieces of work listed below. I’ll be leaving the final drafts of the evaluation of TATAL I started in 2020 to my TATAL colleagues Maria Northcote, Nicole Reinke and Robert Kennelly.

In my Master’s thesis I described what research meant to me by using weaving as a metaphor (McCormack, 1995). I thought of research as a series of threads that creates the research fabric woven by others before you. In places the weaving will have been strong and the pattern of the fabric clear, while in other places the pattern is less clear with threads that may have unravelled, become loose, or been forgotten. The job of the researcher is to take the threads where the pattern is unclear and begin a research project that weaves these threads to clarify the existing pattern.

This powerful metaphor for living practice recognises that while your individual contribution to the fabric may feel small, you are contributing to something bigger, and the pattern becomes clearer with every thread added.