Volume 11 Issue 2

I’d never been to “Sunnyside” until a few weeks ago. So, the opportunity to tour Ellen White’s Australian home excited me. As a guide ushered our large group through the historic building, I saw not only the room where the Seventh-day Adventist Church pioneer wrote a large proportion of her writings, including The Desire of Ages, but also other items she’d used in the running of her household. Our guide interspersed historical facts with interesting snippets and captivating stories of everyday life.

Seventh-day Adventist Church pioneer Ellen White’s connection with Australia commenced with a vision she received on April 1, 1874. She referred to it as an “impressive dream in which the messenger said, ‘You are entertaining too limited ideas of the work for this time. . . . You must take broader views. The message will go in power to all parts of the world, to Oregon, to Europe, to Australia, to the islands of the sea.’” Fifteen years later, at the age of 64, she arrived in Sydney in December, 1891.

The humble letter proved a communication lifeline for Avondale alumna and missionary Margaret Watts between 1956 and 1966. She wrote letters almost every week to family and friends. For four years, the letters came from Redcliffe Mission Station on the island of Aobe in the New Hebrides, and for the last six years they came from Inus Mission Station on the island of Bougainville in the Territory of New Guinea. Dearest Folks: Letters Home From a Missionary Wife and Mother publishes almost 100 of these surviving letters, mostly from mid-1964 onwards.

As an administrative assistant working at the Ellen G White Seventh-day Adventist Research Centre at Avondale College of Higher Education for the past two decades, I’ve been privileged to read Ellen White’s correspondence and manuscripts. She wrote a large portion of her writings, particularly those on the life of Jesus, while living in Australia. I’ve been encouraged and moved by her life’s journey while she lived in Cooranbong, a town near Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, where Avondale is located. Her correspondence during this time reveals Ellen White as a caring Christian woman giving her all to the work of the gospel.

Avondale has helped establish the first association for Christian early childhood educators in Australia at an inaugural conference organised and hosted by its Discipline of Education. The inter-denominational Australian Christian Early Childhood Educators Association (ACECEA) will bring academics and practitioners together to network, collaborate on research and promote informed practice. “We recognise a key strength will be unity of purpose,” says Kaye Judge, a lecturer in education (early childhood) at Avondale.

A journey into the amazing world of seeds.

“How can seed pods encourage a sense of

awe and wonder in young learners?”

This paper addresses some of the educational needs of students with hearing impairments, for this group has unique learning needs especially in relation to language acquisition. Throughout the course of history there have been two dominant approaches to deaf education, oral (speech) and manual (sign language). Despite conflicting opinions between medical professionals and educators in the field of Deaf education, current research suggests that flexibility and an openness to utilise a combination according to the individual needs of the students is the best approach to forming language proficiency. This paper will use these findings to suggest a holistic range of effective management strategies for educators, which target the physical, academic, social, emotional and communicative wellbeing of deaf students.

The article challenges school leaders in Christian faith-based (CFB) schools to live Jesus’ kingdom values and virtues in their daily professional working and personal lives. To further this, the writer proposes an ethics, moral and spiritual purpose lens to ‘refract’ distinctive leadership profiles ─ complementary to the published Australian Professional Standard for Principals (APSP) ─ to encourage principals to engage in reflection and renewal, and bridge the gap between leadership rhetoric and practice.

This study examined the impact of a 10-week multimodal wellbeing intervention (The Lift Project) on pre-service teachers’ personal wellbeing and their perceptions of the value of the intervention when embedded into their course of study. Ninety-two percent of the 103 students (20.1±3.0 yrs, 29 males/74 females) indicated that the intervention positively influenced their wellbeing. Significant improvements were observed in all domains of wellbeing measured, including: perceived physical health (5.1%, p<0.001), physical health behaviours (7.4%, p<0.001), mental health (16.3%, p<0.001), vitality (18.9%, p<0.001), spirituality (4.4%, p<0.01), and life satisfaction (7.1%, p<0.001). Further, significant reductions were recorded in symptoms of depression (-30.6%, p<0.001), anxiety (-34.9%, p<0.001) and stress (-23.3%, p<0.001). The pre-service teachers indicated that the intervention would equip them to support the wellbeing of their future students. The findings of the study suggest that meaningful improvements can be achieved in the wellbeing of pre-service teachers by embedding experiential studies of wellbeing into pre-service teacher education.