Bridging the Gap: Negotiating Policy and Pedagogy in a Sino-Spanish Music Education Collaboration: A Case Study of Exchange Programs in Barcelona

Abstract

This study examines the gap between policy implementation and pedagogical practice in Sino-Spanish music education collaborations in Barcelona, focusing on how students, administrators, and teachers negotiate this gap as negotiators, transmitters, and adaptators. Using a qualitative multi-case design centered on the Fundació Conservatori Liceu as the primary case, with ESMUC, UB and the researcher's UIC program as comparative cases, the study draws on 14 semi-structured student interviews alongside interviews with administrators and teachers. Findings show that English-medium instruction policies are difficult to implement in a Catalan-speaking environment, and institutions respond either by tightening admissions or by leaving students to cope on their own. At the pedagogical level, Chinese students develop a spectrum of expression strategies that challenge readings of silence as simply oppression or maladjustment. Aesthetic negotiation follows multiple pathways through which students reconcile different understandings of what constitutes good performance. Informal support works in a patchwork way, depending on whether students are willing to make their struggles visible. The value of third-party coordination and reverse cultural influence is conditional, shaped by institutional strategy, agency type, and the scale of the Chinese student population. The main contribution of this study is a typology of silence, which reframes the task of helping students speak as something that first requires diagnosis before any intervention. The study extends Lipsky's (1980) street-level bureaucracy theory to a cross-cultural context, showing that policy gaps are structurally difficult to bridge. Institutions respond differently: some invest in third-party coordination, others individualize support, and still others screen students out rather than adapt the system. It challenges Freire's (1970) banking education critique by demonstrating that silence in cross-cultural classrooms is not always a sign of oppression but can reflect respect, strategic calculation, or language constraints. Drawing on Young's (2003) cultural translation theory, it adds conditions under which reverse cultural influence occurs, and builds on Ward and Kennedy's (1999) sociocultural adaptation framework by identifying help-seeking behaviour as a prerequisite for support systems to function. The study ends by reflecting on how transferable this framework might be to other intercultural learning contexts, and what its findings mean for cultural managers working across significant cultural differences.