Step 3: Consider alternative cultural influences and select one or more of them to explore.

The purpose of this step is twofold: to consider carefully a range of possible cultural influences on your puzzlement and then to select one or more of them that you think are likely to be influencing your puzzlement (based, in part, on the information you identified in Step 2, and on previous theory and research). The cultural influence(s) you select become, in effect, your research questions.

Rationale for examining cultural influences

School structures and your professional training encourage you to focus on influences from individual psychology or family dynamics when trying to explore your puzzlements about students. While such influences are important in understanding and helping students, they are only part of the complex influences that affect students' achievement and behavior in schools. Exploring cultural influences is especially important in today's complex and diverse schools.

Cultural influences and CIP questions

To help you consider systematically a wide range of possible cultural influences on your puzzlement, I have organized them through "CIP questions," which are linked to below. Carefully consider all of the cultural influences discussed in the following CIP questions and subquestions before you decide which cultural influence(s) to examine in your study. You can move easily through all the CIP questions and their subquestions by starting with question 3.1 below and then following the "Consider next question" link at the bottom of each page.

3.1	How might your beliefs or values, or those of other educators, be contributing to the puzzling situation?
3.2	How might the school's culture(s) be contributing to the puzzling situation?
3.3	How might cultural mismatches be contributing to the puzzling situation?
3.4	How might students' experiences and meanings be contributing to the puzzling situation?
3.5	How might individual students' cultural "negotiations" be contributing to the puzzling situation?

Complete List of CIP Step 3 Questions and Subquestions

Scope and order of cultural influences in the CIP questions

The CIP questions draw attention to a wide range of cultural influences that may help you understand and address your puzzlement. Language is an important part of all cultures; consequently, the CIP questions consider cultural influences related to language and second language acquisition. The CIP questions also consider cultural influences related to historical events, socio-economic status and power.

The CIP questions begin with a focus on cultural influences directly related to you and other educators (3.1). They move on to consider cultural influences related to school (3.2), home-school cultural mismatches (3.3), and students' experiences and meanings related to the broader society (3.4). The CIP questions end with a focus on students' negotiations of cultural influences (3.5), i.e., whether they accept, resist, challenge, or attempt to change cultural influences. The order and scope of the CIP questions is designed to help you consider of a wide range of cultural influences.

Sources for CIP questions

The CIP questions draw heavily from research and theory in educational anthropology, but also from work in educational sociology, linguistics, and multicultural education. Each CIP question is based on research that has demonstrated that addressing a particular cultural influence can contribute to improving the educational experiences of students.

Scholars within the disciplines listed above sometimes argue about which one cultural influence is the most useful for understanding students' educational experiences. The CIP does not take such a stance. The multiple cultural influences represented in the CIP questions in Step 3 all have something to offer as you seek to explore and address your puzzlements.

The concept of "culture"

The concept of culture generally refers to knowledge, attitudes, values, and related behavior patterns shared with others. The concept of culture is useful to you and other educators because research has shown that understanding cultural influences on education is important and that addressing cultural influences can improve students' educational experiences.

However, some scholars have indicated concerns about using the concept of culture: that it can minimize recognition of variability within cultures and foster stereotypes; that it contributes toward defining individuals solely in terms of a single static identity; that it emphasizes conformity to cultural norms; and that it tends to emphasize differences between "us" and "others."

These critiques indicate that you must pay attention to how you define and use the term "culture," and that when examining cultural influences you should

• attend to variability within cultures;
• view culture as a continual process of creating meaning rather than as a static body of knowledge
• be aware that individuals participate in multiple cultures and that they work out aspects of their cultural identities within specific contexts;
• look for challenges and resistance to cultural norms as well as conformity to them; and
• examine commonalities across cultures as well as differences among them.

Erickson (2002) and Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) responded to the critiques in their discussions of culture. To move beyond viewing culture as static and as related only to membership in a labeled group (such as gender, religious, or ethnic groups), these authors focused on persons' participation in various cultural "practices." They hold that culture is not something one has by being born into a particular group; it is something that one develops over time as one participates (in varying degrees) in different local "communities of practice" and acquires different subsets of cultural knowledge, attitudes, values, and related behavior patterns. Individuals' initial community of practice is their family of origin; but as individuals get older, the extended family, schools, peer groups, religious affiliations, jobs, sports groups, clubs, hobbies, retirement situations, and the media provide opportunities to participate in different communities of practice (Erickson, 2002).

However, Eisenhart (1995) pointed out that individuals do not automatically or uniformly learn the attitudes and behaviors of a particular community of practice, and that some individuals may resist or challenge the practices of a community. She suggested that the identities claimed or built by individuals (for example, whether they are marginal participants, become more expert, or actively resist practices) influence their stance toward learning the cultural practices of a particular community. Thus, a person's varied participation in the practices of dynamic communities of practice can be distinguished from their membership in an ethnic [or other] group (Gutiérrez andRogoff, 2003).

However, Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) indicated that they "are not arguing that group membership defined by ethnicity, race, and language use is irrelevant. These categories have long-standing influences on the cultural practices in which people have the opportunity to participate, often yielding shared circumstances, practices, and beliefs that play important and varied roles for groups members" (p. 21). In a related vein, Eisenhart (1995) argued that individuals construct their identities from the various cultural models and social processes to which they are exposed.

In these views, every person is multicultural because they participate in multiple communities of practice. Moreover, every person has an active role in taking a stance toward the cultural practices of these communities.

For a very accessible discussion of culture applied to "teaching cultures," see Anderson-Levitt (2002, pp. 5-12, 17-36, and 255-274). She (Anderson-Levitt, 2002, pp. 28-33)offered the metaphor of "webs of culture" to convey some of the complexity of culture. She suggested imagining individuals connected by strands, with each strand connecting those who share one instance of knowledge, attitude, or value shared with others. If one "zooms out" and takes a big picture view of this web, one would see overlapping clusters of people who share many (but not all) ideas. If one "zooms in" on individuals, one would see each person participating in many different clusters.

See Henze and Hauser (1999) and Sleeter (2001) for general discussions of culture in relation to education. Atkinson (1999) presented a view of culture for practitioners working with English language learners (ELLs). For summaries of the development of the concept of culture over the past forty years and discussions of current conceptions of culture, see Eisenhart (2001a, 2001b) and Erickson (2002).

Selecting one or more cultural influence as the research question(s) for your CIP study

From your reading about cultural influences (from the CIP questions in Step 3 and other resources), identify one or more cultural influences that you think may be relevant to your puzzlement. The cultural influence(s) you select become the basis for your research question(s).

The CIP questions provide a format that you can follow in stating your research question(s). However, you may want to adapt the CIP questions in Step 3 slightly to fit your particular study. For example, CIP Step 3.2 asks "How might the school's culture(s) be contributing to the puzzling situation?" Scott Seifried in his CIP study of middle school choir classes might have rephrased his research question related to Step 3.2 as "How might the culture of the GT program, in which most of my eighth grade music students participate, influence their expectations and behavior in my choir class?"

Role of cultural influences

The cultural influence you select for your research question should be viewed as the starting point for your explorations. You might find that as you gather information one or more other cultural influences are helpful in understanding the puzzlement you are investigating. If this occurs, you can then shift your efforts to collecting information related to the new influence(s). (See Scott Seifried's CIP study for an example of someone who gradually refined his questions as he carried out his CIP study.)

Because cultural influences are a starting point, you might wonder about exploring your puzzlement with a totally "open" stance, i.e., without using any cultural influence in your research question. However, this is not really possible. We all bring (usually hidden) assumptions to our investigations. Beginning with one or more cultural influences in mind helps by explicitly identifying a cultural influence or influences that you want to use as a starting point.

Although the CIP questions in Step 3 are listed separately, the cultural influences they discuss actually are interrelated or "woven together" into webs of influence (Anderson-Levitt, 2002; Jacob, 1999). Each CIP questions focus attention on a particular cultural influence, but it is important to keep in mind that the various cultural influences are interrelated as you seek to understand what is happening and to develop useful interventions.

Using other resources

Theory and research conducted by others (whether cited in the CIP Web site or not) can be useful to you as you are considering possible cultural influences on your puzzlement. While theory and studies conducted by others cannot tell you exactly what cultural influences are relevant to your puzzlement, they can often provide some useful clues or suggestions. Research examining cultural influences on students or school subjects similar to the focus of your puzzlement can help you identify cultural influences that previous researchers have found relevant. Moreover, research on students or school subjects different from the focus of your puzzlement can also provide ideas for possible cultural influences related to your puzzlement because similar cultural processes occur across a range of students and school subjects.

The Resources section of the CIP site provides links to many potentially useful references and Web sites; you can identify others by searching library catalogs and the Web. The Tutorial on Using Resources in the CIP provides general suggestions in the Overview. The Tutorial also provides two other aids: it examines a sample CIP study to see how one educator used other resources in her study, and it presents suggestions and a template for using resources in your own CIP study.

Once you have selected one or more CIP question to guide your study, it is important that you read beyond the discussion presented on the CIP Web site in order to develop a deeper understanding of the cultural influence(s) you will examine. Reading sources cited on the CIP Web site for the cultural influence you selected is an obvious place to begin. These sources will help you deepen your understanding of the cultural influence(s) you selected, which will allow you to conduct a more useful study.

Suggestions for writing

Memos can be a useful tool in this CIP step to help you explore possible cultural influences on your puzzlement. For example, you could write a memo as you read through the CIP Step 3 pages to explore how the various cultural influences discussed might be influencing your puzzlement. To do this you might first state your puzzlement, then for each of the substeps in CIP Step 3, you might list the influence discussed and your thoughts about whether this might be influencing your puzzlement--creating a "log" of your thoughts about each possible influence. You could add further thoughts as you reflect on possible influences in order to decide which to examine in your study.

Once you have decided on which cultural influence(s) you want to examine, you might draft this section of your report. First, state the cultural influence(s) you have selected to examine. Then, for each cultural influence selected, briefly discuss why you think that cultural influence is a likely influence on your puzzlement--drawing on information you collected in Step 2 as well as information from previous theory or research for support.

Consider first question: 3.1
Step 2-Known Information | Step 4-Gather Information