Fostering Wonder & Cultivating Virtue

Elizabeth has been a teacher and school leader for almost 20 years. She has taught numerous subjects including religious education, history, and politics. The quality of her teaching is reflected in the academic success achieved by her students - a number of which received Premier’s Awards under her tutelage at Year 12 (placing them in the top 5 students in their subject for the State). Elizabeth has a passion for Classical Education. Over recent years, she has developed a classical education curriculum for use by Australian students (as part of her work to support establishing the Newman Academy) and subsequently worked (as Deputy Principal) to implement classical education and train teachers at an Independent Catholic school in Queensland. Elizabeth is the author of Australian Progymnasmata- Fables and several literature guides. She now lives in the Riverina (NSW) with her husband and children - where she provides her children with a truly classical education through homeschooling.

Madeleine lives in Melbourne with her husband, Robert, and together they educate their six children at home. She studied the Classical Liberal Arts as one of the inaugural students at Campion College, holds a Master of Teaching at Melbourne University, is an accredited tutor in The Spalding Method, and is currently completing The Institute of Excellence’s (IEW’s) Instructor Accreditation Program. Madeleine has over ten years’ experience in teaching at both primary and secondary schools as well as providing private tuition in English Literature and phonics instruction. In more recent years, immersing her own children in a classical education has been Madeleine’s prime focus, however, she is now thrilled to also be a part of Via Classica, relishing the opportunity to guide your children to pursue and contemplate the transcendentals through the analysis of great literature, helping them to become who God wants them to be – wiser and more eloquent, virtuous, and saintly human beings!

Ronan Reilly lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife Beátrice and four children: Gregory, Elodie, Julien and Elena.  Born in Sydney, Australia in 1991, Ronan attended primary school at St Jospeh’s, Belmore and high school at St Mary’s Cathedral College. During his time at the Cathedral College, Ronan received a Scholarship as a Chorister in the St Mary’s Cathedral Choir. This commitment involved a weekly average of ten hours of singing and rehearsing during school term. Whilst at the Cathedral College, Ronan also undertook weekly lessons on the violoncello. Ronan commenced a Bachelor of Theology at Notre Dame University, Sydney in 2010 and graduated in 2014. During this time, Ronan was a member of the Schola Cantorum of the Holy Cross at Maternal Heart of Mary Church, Lewisham.  In 2016, Ronan accepted a position as Director of Music at an independent Catholic School in Brisbane, Australia. Over the past decade, Ronan has spent thousands of hours teaching children and adults to appreciate and understand the musical tradition of the Church and the Western Classical Music tradition more broadly.With experience in the areas of Theology, Sacred Music and musical pedagogy, Ronan founded Pueri Publications in 2019 as a way to instruct young children about the rich patrimony of sacred music. Ronan has been involved with Via Classica since early 2021 and is committed to instructing children in the classical understanding and practice of western music. 

Liam has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Sydney with majors in physics and mathematics. He then trained as a teacher and has over eight years of experience teaching science and mathematics to high school students in Sydney and the NSW Riverina. In his teaching practice, he often noted and became frustrated with the disconnected, siloed nature of prescribed content, both within and across his subject areas, and the generally poor academic expectations of students. He has gradually come to believe that a rigorous, classically based model requiring mastery of content is vital to the education of pupils.

Celia Lambert was born in Melbourne in 1983 and has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Melbourne University in Literature and Classics. She has also studied Professional Writing and Editing. She began teaching in 2007 as an English teacher, teaching in a wide variety of schools in a search to find deep literary analysis being done. It wasn’t until she moved into Latin teaching in 2014 that she discovered the type of literary analysis she had been searching for, where the senior Latin classes read classics and studied traditional rhetorical devices. A deputy principal there introduced her to Dorothy Sayers’ essay on the Lost Tools of Learning and the classical tradition. There are many ways of teaching Latin, but she experiences most enjoyment in the beautiful simplicity of the grammar method. Celia lives in Brisbane with her husband and two young children, and she has just begun to homeschool. One day she wants to open a tranquil library where there are classes for students wanting an education by books.