Learning for life

Course participants enrol in short courses at the Centre for Continuing Educations for many reasons: to learn skills to enhance their professional career, to become fluent in another language, to develop critical thinking – or simply to keep the mind engaged.

Many are delighted to discover other unexpected benefits, such as making new friends or that learning can be its own reward. Such is the case with Jehan Magdi, Helen Armstrong and Jeff Ruffels: between them, they have attended more than 200 CCE courses over two decades.

Helen Armstrong, who has been attending CCE since 2005, originally sought out courses that would help her in her career. An academic, author and urban design landscape architect, she felt she needed to sharpen up her writing skills and enrolled in a creative writing course led by Mark Tredinnick.

I’m a university lecturer. And I was writing a book and I put in the finished version to the publishers and they said, ‘We don’t like it, it’s too academic.â€