ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the concept of culture and describes a way of thinking about and operationally defining aspects of culture in educational research on two connected challenges: the minority achievement gap and barriers to school improvement and reform. It presents and illustrates two such units of analysis: cultural settings and cultural models. The chapter shows that the value of empirically assessing both settings and models to successfully accommodate an intervention to a particular cultural context. It argues that settings and cultural models are key units for understanding why it is so hard to change teaching in public schools. Cultural models encode shared environmental and event interpretations, what is valued and ideal, what settings should be enacted and avoided, who should participate, the rules of interaction, and the purpose of the interactions. The idea of culture has provided educational researchers and practitioners with many concepts that have been applied to important educational problems and critical questions.
