Addressing gender inequalities in music theory education: a gender-responsive flipped classroom framework

While music education plays a vital role in shaping learners' identities and participation, persistent gender inequalities continue to influence engagement, particularly in music theory education, where abstract content and traditionally lecture-dominated pedagogies may reinforce unequal participation. Although flipped classroom (FC) and self-directed learning (SDL) are widely recognized for enhancing engagement and learner autonomy, their application has largely remained generic and insufficiently responsive to the discipline-specific cognitive demands of music theory and to gendered participation patterns. To address this gap, this study develops a gender-responsive FC–SDL framework tailored to undergraduate music theory education. Drawing on a structured literature synthesis of 46 studies published between 2015 and 2025 and employing iterative thematic analysis, the study identifies key instructional, learner-related, and contextual mechanisms shaping engagement and participation. The findings indicate that learning in music theory is grounded in discipline-specific tasks—including harmonic analysis, counterpoint construction, and aural training—which require the integration of symbolic reasoning, auditory perception, and rule-based processing. At the same time, gendered differences in confidence, participation, and self-regulation function as mediating mechanisms that influence how learners engage with these tasks and may reproduce inequalities if not explicitly addressed in instructional design. Building on these insights, the proposed framework integrates task-specific learning processes with gender-responsive instructional strategies, advancing a mechanism-based and discipline-sensitive model. This study offers a theoretically grounded and practically applicable framework for promoting equitable participation and effective learning in music theory education.