McDermott and Varenne advocate for a “cultural analysis” approach to education research. Too often in education research, practitioners have focused on “problem” groups, forming their research questions and solutions around static notions of difference and common sense solutions. This inability to stand outside of their comfort zones, reflecting on the very categories they use to study students, has created research and policies which result only recreating the conditions causing the problems in the first place. Instead, McDermotte and Varenne’s “cultural analysis” requires “we take persons seriously while analytically looking through them – as much as possible in their own terms – to the world with which they are struggling” (7). At heart, this cultural analysis means an analysis of the cultural constructions influencing individuals’ actions and understandings of a given situation.
