Associate Professor Jenkins is the Deputy Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She  is an expert Initial Teacher Educator and a highly skilled music educator with a wide range of experience and knowledge in the Performing Arts. Her education and research work are underpinned by a particular focus on inclusive teaching practices. This strong belief in inclusive education has seen her work across a range of associated leadership roles to support students from differing backgrounds and experiences to reach their academic and personal potential.  She leverages her strong performing arts background as a means to drive socially inclusive educational practices and to include students more actively in their educational life.

Associate Professor Jenkins has a strong teacher practitioner focus and an emphasis on teacher-led research. She uses Action Research and Experiential Learning to drive flexible and contemporary teaching practice, including the combination of a Blended Learning and Experiential Learning approach in the music method classroom. The Blended Learning and Experiential Learning approach is underpinned by pedagogy which re-considers the role of the teacher and student in the classroom. She has disseminated the findings of her research and innovative teacher practitioner work via various national and international journals, a book and book chapters and through the delivery of papers at a wide range of conference papers in New Zealand, London, Paris, Athens, United States, Canada and Australia.

Associate Professor Jenkins also uses historical research methodology to inform and give perspective to all that she does. Her ground breaking research about Australian women music educators from 1890-1950 enabled a more complex understanding of her work in socially inclusive education and inclusive student advising. The early Australian women music educators faced prejudice and discrimination, as well as social exclusion, which aligns and relfects the types of experiences students from diverse backgrounds can experience today.

Current and prior PhD supervisions include:

• Returning to instrumental music performance and music teaching post COVID-19
• Music teaching activities in early childhood centres and kindergartens
• Creating compassionate schools: Principals implementing compassionate school leadership
• Internationalising the student experience: Australian domestic student perspectives
• Flow experiences in Shakuhachi teaching via skype
• What is the impact of the Early Learning Years Framework on teaching music in preschool classrooms?
• The impact of mindfulness on pre-service music teachers
• Instrumental practice with digital technology: Facilitating children's self-regulation of music learning
• International Chinese students' perceptions of social experiences at an Australian university
• Embodied creativity: The phenomenology of early childhood dance.
• Music Performance anxiety: educational relationships between instrumental music teachers and students
• The influence of Confucianism and Western Psychological and religious Culture on Identity and Music Learning among Chinese Musicians
• An examination of the work of studio music teachers as a contribution to the musical life of Victoria, 1900-1950.