Week 36/2025: Adult learners week

Week of 1 September 2025

A week of celebrating learning.

This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.

Adult learners week

This year is the 30th anniversary of Adult Learners Week in Australia. I’m told the week started in Tasmania, so to celebrate this, Adult Learning Australia, which organises the week, launched the program in Devonport on Monday (1 September).

What is Adult Learners Week?

Adult Learners Week promotes lifelong learning and encourages people to reflect on their learning and to explore new opportunities. It tells us that “it’s never too late to start or continue learning”.

The theme for 2025 is “Celebrate Learning Together”.

The ALW website says the week is about:

• promoting the range of learning possibilities

• making learning options relevant and accessible to learners

• creating a culture of lifelong learning

• building a bridge between basic, vocational and general adult education (including literacy and numeracy)

• showing the strong relationship between adult learning, strong democracies and productive communities

• creating a learning society that everyone can access.

Organisations and businesses are encouraged to host events that promote the benefits of learning and celebrate the achievements of adult learners whatever form their learning takes.

ALW 2025 launch

The ALW launch was livestreamed from Devonport, so I was able to attend and it was fantastic.

Trawlwoolway man Dave mangenner Gough delivered the Welcome to Country. He spoke of how there are no survivors of the original people who lived in this Country, the Punnilerpanner, and that now the custodians of the whole island and the islands are the Tasmanian Aboriginal people of today, which is a big responsibility to carry. Dave reminded us that we all have to acknowledge the truth of what happened in the past.

Dave spoke about how important learning had been to his family’s survival. He said that he sees himself as “a learner and a teacher and a learner” and believes that we all need to be continually learning. I agree.

Some great advice he left us with was to never be afraid to ask questions, and to always believe in what you can do, not what people tell you can’t do.

Brendan Murray spoke as a former adult learning ambassador. He’s an Aboriginal man from North West Tasmania who had always struggled at school. His life changed when he went to an adult literacy course at TAFE and he says now he can’t stop learning. Brendan’s story was wonderful to hear, and I found this article from the ABC about him from Adult Learners Week in 2022.

There was also a panel discussion with this year’s Tasmanian learning ambassadors, who all have very different stories of what learning has enabled them to do.

You can watch a recording of the launch here.

The launch was an inspiring way to kick off this week. I was grateful to have been able to undertake some of the 45-minute webinars offered through the training organisation at work, including a really interesting session on having coaching conversations.

I also spent a lot of time working on my assignment for my uni course, which has taken way longer than I expected it to. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve rewatched clips from Twelfth Night to get my referencing correct!

Habit tracker

Existing habits

• Go outside first thing (7 days): 7/7
• 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 6/7
• Hip exercises (5 days): 5/5
• Walk (7 days): 6/7
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 7/7
• 9.00 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 2/6
• Evening routine (6 days): 5/6

New habits

• Fill water bottle in the morning (5 days): 5/5
• Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 2/7
• Mid-day journalling (7 days): 3/7
• Thinking time (4 days): 5/4
• Read aloud (7 days): 5/7

Summary of the week

Some positive things

Discovering Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope.

It is, if you can imagine this, Star Wars A New Hope translated into Shakespearean language.

—o help
Me, Obi-wan Kenobi, help. Thou art
Mine only hope.

Fun with spider webs.

What did I learn this week?

I learned about cutthroat compounds from Merriam Webster. They say that a common compound noun in English takes the form modifier + noun, where the first noun modifies the second noun, which is the noun that tells us what the thing is. So, ‘houseboat’ is a type of boat, and ‘boathouse’ is a type of boat.

There are other types of compound nouns where the second part of the word is a verb but it works the same way (noun + verb). The noun comes first and it modifies the second word, which tells us what the thing is. So you get ‘haircut’ and ‘sunrise’.

There is a rarer type of compound where a verb precedes and modifies the noun (verb + noun), but this tells us what the thing or person does, not what it is. The noun is the direct object of the verb. So:

• A cut-throat is not a type of throat, it is something or someone that cuts throats.
• Similarly, a pickpocket picks pockets.
• And, a scarecrow scares crows.

Here’s a Britannica article from the person who gave them this name, linguist Brianne Hughes. (Or a five-minute talk if that’s more your thing.)

What did I notice this week?

Shadows on the back of the sandstone buildings in Parliament Square that look like architectural columns.

What was the best thing this week?

Baby plovers!

I was alerted to them by the parents screeching at me when I walked past the park on Tuesday. I hadn’t even realised they were there. A lady watching from over the road said they’d laid their eggs on her roof!  She could hear them rolling around, then they hatched and the babies were on the roof, then they all jumped off. That is quite remarkable!

They have since relocated.

What am I reading this week?

• Human Nature by Jane Rawson
• Grendel by John Gardner

What am I watching this week?

• Resident Alien