Students entered Mount Lawley Teachers College, with the intent of teaching primary students. Some transferred to Secondary College to teach secondary students. Some people left teaching and others stayed. This section allows students to indicate where they found their place in the world and if MLTC helped them in their lives and various careers.

Moved to another institutions part of the way through

Rivka Finley:

I really loved my year at Mount Lawley Teachers’ College and vowed to return and work there. In the interim, I studied at STC and WAIT and ended up teaching at Mount Lawley Senior High and Katanning. I worked in ESL, but there was no training for this at all, but a big need as many ships from Italy, Greece and the former Yugoslavia, were arriving packed with new immigrants. I was given a series of books called Situational English, and left to my own devices.

The rats and mice in Katanning, curtailed my teaching career. The skills I learned at MLTC put me in good stead to work at Curtin in the ESL section. My materials were authentic and other teachers wanted them and also liked to team-teach with me. I taught ESL at TAFE in Queensland, when I was studying at UQ, as well as designing learning materials for the deaf at Griffith University.

Later, I finally made it back to MLTC, which was then ECU, where I worked for nearly 10 years, in the language laboratories, and ended up doing defacto teaching with staff, using the latest technologies. Before retirement, I did a 7 year stint at Curtin as a webmaster.

Got married and/or had children

Marjorie Bly

I never taught formally – I married young and had children early. I did run a pre school at Cocos (Keeling) Islands for a couple of years when my then-husband was posted there. I’ve also used the skills I learned to develop and present a range of public education seminars over the years.

I found my real calling when I ended up working for the National Archives years later – a perfect melding of my passion for history, archival records and helping people through research and education. (It was my pleasure to run a very successful practicum program for ECU Archives and Information Management students when I became Assistant Director in 2005).

My MLTC years formed a substantial part of that bridge between being a child and becoming a grown up.  The new style of teacher education, a new building, new colleagues all played a role in how I matured. The times were reflective of that transformational change; the Vietnam War was happening, social change was all around us – the Pill, equal pay for equal work, universal health care, free university education, the ending of the Vietnam War and the end of conscription, to name a few.

It was an exciting time to be involved. I really value the life experience I gained during that part of my life.

 

Had a pathway other than teaching

 

Remained teachers