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 topdown 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.