Rate My Professor Clare Hall

Clare Hall (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, with a BA in Music Performance majoring in Viola, she has taught music and movement from preschool to Year 12, specializing in early childhood and primary arts education, children’s singing, choral conducting, and string education. In her current role, Hall works with pre-service teachers to promote transdisciplinary pedagogies and critical, creative approaches to performing arts across the curriculum. She facilitates creative projects supporting First Nations communities in passing on Indigenous languages through song and maintains her viola playing with interests in Greek and Celtic folk traditions and improvised musical practices. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching draw on 30 years as a musician, performer, and educator, working across music, sound, performance, and sociology. Inspired by feminist and queer gender theory, Bourdieu’s sociology, Indigenous praxis, and critical disability studies, she applies ethnographic, narrative, and arts-based methods to examine intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, and abilities in arts participation and education.

Hall’s multi award-winning doctoral study received the Award for Doctoral Research in Education and the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal in 2013, along with recognition from the Australian Association for Research in Education for early career excellence. She was a finalist for Monash Postgraduate Association Supervisor of the Year in 2018. Key publications include her book Masculinity, Class and Music Education: Choirboys Performing Middle-class Masculinities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); co-edited volumes Sociological Thinking in Music Education: International Intersections (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Decolonising and Indigenising Music Education: First Nations Leading Research and Practice (Routledge, 2024); and articles such as “Beyond the gender binary: a survey of gender marginalization and social boundaries in Australian jazz and improvisation” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024), “Teaching jazz history: disrupting gendered narratives” (Frontiers in Education, 2024), and “(Re)imagining early childhood teacher education—Belonging, Being, and Becoming in the Arts through A/r/tography” (2024). She is founding co-leader of the Decolonising and Indigenising Music Education Special Interest Group of the International Society for Music Education, co-convened the International Symposium on the Sociology of Music Education in London (2017) and Texas (2019), leads the ARC-funded project Diversifying Music in Australia: Gender Equity in Jazz and Improvisation, founded the Singing Indigenous Languages Collective in 2023, and initiated the Faculty of Education’s Neurocomplexity Collaboratory.