Recontextualising Confucian aesthetics in arts-integrated music education: embodiment, cultural identity, and the tensions of standardised education

In the context of globalisation and educational reform, culturally grounded forms of learning often sit uneasily beside standardised curricula and measurable outcomes. This conceptual article develops a framework for recontextualising Confucian aesthetics within arts-integrated music education. It defines this orientation through harmony, ritual propriety, music, and relational self-cultivation, and compares it with Deweyan inquiry and experiential reconstruction without treating the traditions as either equivalent or opposed. The analysis draws purposively on foundational and recent scholarship across five domains (Confucian aesthetics, arts integration, embodied learning, cultural identity, and standardised education) and uses abductive comparison to identify convergences, tensions, and explanatory relationships. It argues that music education can function as an embodied and ethical site of knowledge-making in which teachers mediate among technical standards, cultural meaning, and relational responsibility. Selected studies of English music education and a Norwegian theoretical account of jazz pedagogy offer context-specific points of comparison; they do not establish how these relationships operate in Confucian-heritage arts-integrated classrooms. The framework treats standardisation as an institutional condition to be negotiated through decisions about time, repertoire, interpretation, and assessment. By placing Confucian principles in critical dialogue with arts-integration theory, the article develops implications for repertoire selection, embodied instruction, reflective dialogue, and multidimensional assessment that require further empirical investigation.