{"pk":2086,"title":"Translations and Paradoxes of ‘Western’ Pedagogy: Perspectives of English Language Teachers in a Chinese College","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This paper engages the perspectives of teachers working in an English language department of a vocational college in China. It takes a transdisciplinary approach, applying constructs from the fields of comparative education, postcolonial theories in education, and critical applied linguistics to a case study of English language teaching; while the study assumes somewhat one-way flows of ‘best practices’ from ‘West’ to ‘East,’ it maintains a postcolonial skepticism of the East-West binary and of essentialist notions of culture and progressive education. Specifically, it situates the shifting conditions and practices of so-called Western pedagogies in China under heightened transnationalism and illuminates how these pedagogies are interpreted and translated by six English language instructors at a third tier college. It finds that the pressure to adopt Western, progressive approaches is both top-down and bottom up, that Chinese teachers have fairly consistent understandings of progressive modes, that they adopt Western approaches somewhat sporadically, and that, in practice, Western pedagogy presents a set of paradoxes for teachers and learners.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"educational transfer, Western pedagogy, English language teaching, internationalization of higher education, best practices, postcolonial theory, transnationalism, China"}],"section":"Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1b15w67w","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Xi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Western University","department":"None"},{"first_name":"Paul","middle_name":"","last_name":"Tarc","name_suffix":"","institution":"Western University","department":"None"}],"date_submitted":"2016-02-29T18:25:25Z","date_accepted":"2016-02-29T18:25:25Z","date_published":"2016-12-07T02:06:04Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/l2/article/2086/galley/1373/download/"}]}