Lauren Hill
Select Research Projects
Musicking in 2025: Middle Adolescent Perspectives
This 2025-2026 project in development explores how middle adolescent students - both those enrolled and not enrolled in school music classes - engage with music in their everyday lives. Using mixed methods, including surveys, semi-structured group interviews, and arts-based data collection, the study will investigate music’s role in students’ emotional lives, identities, and social relationships. Framed by musicking theory, social emotional learning (SEL), and critical pedagogy, this study contributes to contemporary understandings of adolescent well-being and music engagement in times of ecological and social uncertainty.
Gatekeeping at Faculties of Music: Ontario Music Teachers Discuss Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the University Audition Processes
This study explores how Ontario high school music teachers perceive equity, diversity, and inclusion within the post-secondary music application and audition process. Findings indicate that structural inequities - such as the financial burden of private lessons, inaccessible audition requirements, and eurocentrism within music education - prevent many students from pursuing post-secondary studies in music. The research was funded by a Trent University Research Development Grant.
Faith in Focus: Using Photovoice to Build Interfaith Understanding
This participatory project used photovoice to promote empathy and interfaith dialogue among university students from diverse religious backgrounds. Participants – who are also co-authors – took photographs and engaged in weekly circle discussions informed by principles from intersectionality and Anishinaabeg teachings. The project culminated in a public art exhibition and contributes to scholarship on interfaith dialogue, campus inclusion, and arts-based inquiry.
Picturing Possibilities: Harnessing Photovoice to Foster Critical Hope in Youth Facing Climate Crisis
This arts-based research project investigates how high school students make meaning of climate change and explore pathways to hope. Using photovoice methodology, students reflected on their relationships with nature and shared their work in a public exhibit. The study contributes to eco-arts education and emerging theories of critical hope and climate resilience.
Forest Walking: Exploring Arts and the Environment
As part of the Trent Arts Research Group’s (TARG) annual colloquia, this work explores sound, creation, and environmental learning. Through field recordings, reflective journaling, and improvised composition, the project investigates the pedagogical possibilities of musique concrète and sound collage. The resulting musical piece, Forest Étude, engages themes of tension and resolution through sonic dissonance and consonance, inspired by and co-created with the natural world.
Doctoral Research
The Hoop Dance Project: Searching for Truth and Reconciliation in an Ontario Elementary School Classroom
This dissertation explored how an Indigenous hoop dance unit co-taught by an Indigenous artist and a white music teacher contributed to reconciliation in an Ontario school. Using the Seven Anishinaabe Good Life Teachings as a theoretical framework, and employing a teaching approach that emphasized movement, friendship, teamwork, and fun, we were able to create a sense of enjoyment and enthusiasm that translated to unique, comfortable, and creative learning. The hoop dance project also created the opportunity to have meaningful conversations about Indigenous issues and topics and confront themes of humility and power sharing in the classroom. I concluded that although decolonizing terrain can be fraught with challenges, the hoop dance unit was ultimately a constructive step in the reconciliation project, evidenced largely by the special nature of our collaboration which gently unsettled conventional educational practice at the school.