Christine started her career in music education in 1994 as a secondary school music teacher, moving into tertiary teaching in 1999. She has been a teacher educator at both the University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Australian Catholic University before beginning work at Excelsia College in 2019. She teaches units in Contemporary and Early Music History, Small Ensemble Studies (Vocal and Chamber), Harmony and Formation III as well as Masters units in Music Pedagogy, Research Methods and Research Project.

Her personal philosophy of teaching has embraced scholarship, reflection, student centred pedagogy, and personal and spiritual formation as she seeks to develop and realise the potential of her students around share goals and mutual ownership of learning outcomes. She employs teaching strategies which start by acknowledging the diversity of students’ prior learning in music, employing social constructivist pedagogies to build formal knowledge upon their informally acquired skills. To this end, activities in performance, improvisation, arranging, analysis and reflection are utilised as a basis for the introduction of unfamiliar abstract concepts requiring music reading or literacy.

She believes that effective assessment requires collaboration, with formative feedback provided throughout learning and assessment schemes. This provides her students with the opportunity to build self-efficacy as learners before more challenging individual ‘theory’ tasks are undertaken.

Scholarship is employed in all areas of her teaching practice with the results used to enrich student learning. Her current research undertaken with Dr Latukefu seeks to explore musicians career trajectories in relation to knowledge, skill and identity formation, with the findings disseminated internationally, impacting pedagogy and curriculum development in an ongoing fashion at Excelsia College.