Creative education, music practices, and gender differences among young Chinese students

Over the last two decades, China has placed more emphasis on learning and practice in the process of fostering creativity in school education. Music inflames the mind and is the key to creativity. Music practices have drawn the attention of many scholars fascinated with their creative properties in both musical and non-musical domains. With particular reference to Shijiazhuang (the capital and largest city in northern China’s Hebei Province), this study aimed to examine the under-researched connection between gender, education, and creative music practices (broadly described as music as a culture of imagination and real-time practice in the learning of diverse music styles and in the participation of music activities in formal and informal learning contexts) as perceived by young Chinese students. The study employed a self-reported survey questionnaire distributed to a sample of students aged eight to 17 attending Grade 4 through Grade 9 in 10 schools located in the city of Shijiazhuang (N = 2,015) conducted between 2019 and 2020. Generally speaking, girls were more positive regarding the value of creativity in school music education, as well as the music practices of diverse music cultures and music activities. This paper will conclude with a debate on the ways that “gender” is comprehended, carried out, and discerned in response to the students’ influential sources and their preferred school subjects in learning creativity, their preferred music styles, and their preferred participation in music activities in both school music lessons and extracurricular activities in learning creativity in the Chinese context.