Avondale Business School team members have been active in sharing and developing their professional knowledge in the last month.
Dr Warrick Long was in Brisbane to deliver the keynote presentation for the annual Connect program for educators and professional staff of Adventist schools throughout South Queensland and Northern Australia. He spoke on the question of 'Who Am I?' and what that means in key relationships with ourselves, our families and in our professional world. It was a chance to reconnect with old friends, former and current students, and to make new friends. The content for the presentation was drawn from some of the ideas and concepts in the core Avondale University MBA unit Theology, Theory and Practice of Leadership
And our own Associate Professor Lisa Barnes presented at the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ), Special Interest Group in Accounting Education in Melbourne in early July. It was a combination of face to face and virtual attendees. Her paper was titled “Development of the SOS Model for Institutions to Support Academic Wellbeing during COVID-19 disruptions and the move to Emergency E-Learning” and discussed the challenges academics and students faced with the rush to online learning during the lockdowns from COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. Her research introduced the SOS model – which provides support for students and academics from an institutional level, down to individual support and development to increase student engagement and reduce stress for academics and supporting their wellbeing during disruption. Her findings are from a collaboration with AFAANZ who allowed her survey to be linked in their newsletter from February to June 2022 https://www.afaanz.org/
Attendance at the conference also allowed her to increase participation in the survey by using QR codes in posters around the conference halls, that allowed conference attendees to complete the survey whilst at the conference. She hopes to use this additional information to write a journal article on the findings. Her conference attendance was supported by a grant from the Christian Education Research Centre (CERC) https://www.avondale.edu.au/research/christian-education/
Dr Peter Williams also attended the Australian Education Research Leaders’ Summit held at the University of South Australia on June 29-30. This summit was convened by the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and the Community of Associate Deans Research in Education (cADRE), with short presentations by education research leaders such as Professor Allyson Holbrook, Professor Michelle Simons, Professor Catherine Manathunga, Professor Jenny Gore and Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington. Issues such as challenges and opportunities in educational research, lifting the profile of educational research, principles for collaboration, and succession planning and the development of future educational research leaders were discussed, with arrival at a consensus for an action plan going forwards, and which will inform the research undertaken by ABS academic staff.