Carol Wexler is a retired Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She designed and taught English-as-a-Foreign-Language courses for university students majoring n various fields. Her research interests were curriculum development, teacher in-service training, English for Specific Purposes, testing. She has published papers in journals and presented at conferences internationally. Since retirement, Carol has become interested in Collective Memory Work and how it can be used by older retired women to make a difference in their lives. She has been involved with a Memory Work group in Sydney which produced an article and conference presentations. She recently started a Collective Memory Work group for older women in Tel Aviv. She is eagerly anticipating input and stimulation for this project from the upcoming conference in Maynooth.
Trees McCormick holds a B.Ed from Indonesia and a M.Ed from Sydney University. She taught in schools, universities and institutes of technology in Hongkong, China and Australia. Trees trained as a Languages teacher, but with the birth of her children her interest shifted to their growth and development and she retrained as an Early Childhood educator. She taught and administrated Child Care and other community courses in Technical and Further Education institutes across Sydney, and returned to English Language teaching when her children grew up. Trees became involved in Memory Work when a group of retired friends got together over coffee bemoaning the fact that retirement and ageing have drastically changed their lives. The women decided to form a group and study their own ageing. What came out of this project has intrigued, surprised, and delighted not just themselves, but many others who have heard of it. She hopes that sharing the group’s experiences at the symposium will help solve some of the issues they faced and provide a way forward for groups such as theirs.
Jenny Onyx (PhD) is Emeritus Professor of Community Management in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She is former Co-Director of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies research centre, and founding editor of Third Sector Review. She is particularly concerned with issues of gender, particularly concerning older women, and the use of alternative research methodologies. She has extensive refereed publications in all these topics.
Carol’s, Trees’ & Jenny’s Contribution at the Symposium
Agents of their own well-being: Women sharing their experiences using Memory-Work with other older women.
This paper explores the collective experience of ageing after retirement using the qualitative method of Memory Work. We are a group of older women, concerned with the overwhelming focus on medicalisation and decline surrounding the topic of ageing, who wanted to explore an alternative view. We will present an outline of our collective Memory Work experience in Sydney over a three-year period. Our learning journey will be documented using the memory triggers: Who am I now that I am over 65; Body maintenance; Fear; Being connected; Taking up a new challenge.
We reject the current medical model of aged care, in favour of a more nuanced model of both loss but also great personal growth, in which life is a privilege and full of richness. We found that post-retirement is a productive time when much personal growth occurs. While age places limitations on our lives, we also gain a new autonomy and confidence. Our mindsets begin to change and we start to reinvent ourselves, to take better care of ourselves and to explore new creative and intellectual pursuits.
Because we experienced rejuvenation in our lives as a result of our participation in the group, it seemed appropriate to apply this method to the formation of similar groups of older women. One group was formed in Tel Aviv, Israel and other attempts were carried out in Sydney during 2020. We will discuss the results of these experiments, the validity of the method and the challenges in applying it to groups of older women.