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Annette Loudon

Annette Loudon

Qualifications

  • BA Dip Ed
  • Grad Cert ESOL
  • Grad Cert Leadership and Management
  • Dip Exercise Science
  • Dip Fitness
  • Various Cert IVs, including Workplace Assessor, Personal Training, Working with Special Needs, Massage, Yoga, Pilates

Background

My professional background for over thirty years has been in the area of access, initially in access to English literacy. One particular research project I undertook in this field concerned the needs of, and later the re-teaching of literacy and numeracy to, adults with acquired dysphasia.

I was also a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages, specialising in refugees and migrants to Australia. In this area, I became a head teacher at Northern Beaches TAFE in Sydney. I specialised in working in teams and in flexible and innovative delivery of the courses offered by my section. I won fellowships to work and conduct research in Japan and England. I still do online marking for students enrolled in English for Academic Purposes through OTEN in TAFE NSW.

Many years later, I retrained as a teacher of Yoga and Pilates and as a Massage Therapist and opened my own business 'Forest Yoga, Massage and Pilates'. The focus of my business was working with people with all kinds of limitations. This included people with physical limitations such as MS and other incapacitating conditions, as well as profound deafness. It also included those with social limitations, such as street kids or people on parole.

For the past two years, I have been living in remote central Australia, working in an indigenous school and with the National Parks of the Northern Territory.

My Masters Project

Since the late 1990s my general yoga classes included an increasing number of women who had or were having treatment for breast cancer, including those with secondary lymphoedema as a result of their treatment. While making a DVD and writing a book on this topic, I found that there was a lack of research into the effect of yoga in reducing secondary lymphoedema for this group of women.

In order to study what could be a very beneficial health outcome in a formal, controlled way, I then applied to become a Masters student at UTAS and here I am.

My passion is to combine all my interests, so that one day I will be able to offer yoga classes through the internet to women with breast cancer and secondary lymphoedema living in remote areas of Australia.