119 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 39, No. 1, March 2005 TEACHING ISSUES TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, the editor asked a teacher educator the following question: How has your experience as a global citizen informed your work in local contexts? Edited by BONNY NORTON University of British Columbia Seepages, Contact Zones, and Amalgam: Internationalizing TESOL VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN University of California Davis, California, United States ■ TESOL Quarterly’s invitation to write about how my experience as a global citizen informs my work in local contexts has prodded me into this written retrospection. I had until a few years ago naively kept my two researching strands—West-based teacher education and my ongoing work with teachers and students in India—separate, unwisely maintain- ing that the two strands (my home community of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India, and my teacher education work in the United States) represent different social realities, with each side having little to say to the other. My justification for keeping them separate was prompted by my ten- dency, among other things, to overfocus on the local. What can I say about caste, gender, or class issues in my home community that will be relevant here in the West? What can I say about TESOL teacher education in the West that will resonate with the local, sociopolitical realities in India (Ramanathan, in press)? The local needs, tools, pedagogic practices, modes of learning, teaching, exams, and bureau- cratic hassles are from some angles so different in the two worlds; how does one carry over to the other? But the points of seepage were always there, and the longer I stayed with my India project, the more obvious and intrusive they became. I had begun this exploration about 7 years ago to better understand the struggles that students educated in the vernacular medium (VM) go through when they encounter English medium (EM) colleges. As one who