Claire Nicholls

Claire Nicholls is a Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland's School of Education since 2022, specializing in music education, community arts development, and audience engagement beyond traditional school settings. Her interdisciplinary approach synthesizes experiential learning, phenomenology, and mindfulness to innovate concert hall pedagogy and community orchestra practices.

Her educational journey includes dual bachelor's degrees (BA/BEd) from the University of Queensland (2007), a Master of Education from Monash University (2014), and a PhD (2019) focused on audience experience in orchestral concerts. Her doctoral work pioneered mindfulness-integrated phenomenological research methods.

Nicholls' research centers on democratizing music education through community arts, with emphases on audience development for children/adolescents, trauma-informed music listening, and Universal Design for Learning in non-auditioned choirs. She champions qualitative methodologies like autoethnography to explore relational audience engagement and concert curation as educational praxis.

Analysis of her 2022-2025 publications reveals a cohesive trajectory: evolving from foundational concert experience studies (2022) toward trauma-responsive practices (2024) and autoethnographic pedagogy (2025). Key themes include spatial design's impact on audience connection, percussion education's undervalued complexity, and sustainable audience development frameworks.

Her accolades include the Research Training Program Scholarship (2018) and Monash University's Best Postgraduate Publication award (2019). She actively contributes to the International Society for Music Education World Conference, advancing global discourse on music pedagogy.

Nicholls serves as Associate Supervisor for two doctoral projects: drama-based respectful relationships education (2024) and UDL applications in adult community choirs (2023). Her grant history includes early-career research support, while her ORCID (0000-0002-5183-0149) reflects 1,619 output views and 456 downloads.

Though no formal lab structure is documented, her community orchestra collaborations—evident in 'Dippy’s Big Day Out' and 'Roary the Lion' outreach concerts—demonstrate embedded partnerships with Toowoomba Concert Orchestra and regional councils to create accessible musical experiences.