Petula McCartney's passion for lifelong education led her to further her own.
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Ms McCartney was one of hundreds of graduates to take to the stage of Albert Hall on Saturday, where the distance student picked up her Graduate Certificate in Education from the University of Tasmania.
She said she was able to learn an incredible amount that would help her with her role at TAFE Queensland, where she has worked teaching English as a second language for seven years.
"Initially I went into it because I was interested in getting a qualification and then found that it was actually very informative for the work that I do," she said.
She previously completed a postgraduate degree in adult and workplace education.
For a time she taught adult literacy and numeracy, and then moved into a program called Skills for Education and Employment which had many students for whom English was a second language.
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She recently put her newfound knowledge to work.
"Recently one of my jobs was vocational education training for a cohort of Chinese adjunct professors that came across for a three-month study tour from a university in Chongqing," she said.
Ms McCartney was the lecturer for the 16 adjunct professors, who all had mid-to-low level English.
"I was trying to teach them really complex topics of how we teach competency-based learning as opposed to academic-learning," she said.
"It really pleased me that over the 21-hours that I delivered those lessons, their English improved no end - they become fluent readers.
Read the list of Northern graduates here
"I thought that was a culmination of everything I'd learned from the grad cert, and it made me able to do that job well."
At the ceremony on Saturday, Ms McCartney was joined by her grandson, Oliver, who was inspired to have university aspirations of his own.
"His mother was the first out of my children to get a degree, and I was the first out of my mother's whole family to get a degree," she said.
"She once said to me, 'educate a man you get an educated man - educate a women you get an educated family'."
She said to her, learning and education was the solution to all world problems.
"I see 15 different nationalities in a classroom ... all countries that could or have been at war with each other, and they have a shared culture of learning," she said.
"By being a mature-aged person myself, it gives them confidence that it's worth the battle."