The process of teaching and learning involves (and is affected by) several factors, including the teacher, the students and the context in which it occurs (Cohen & Ball, 2001; Eisenmann & even, in press; Manouchehri & Goodman, 2000). However, most of the researches that focus on teaching and learning examine only the teacher(s) and/or the students, while referring to the context as fixed. Therefore, the literature provides little information about the role of the local context (e.g., school, families etc.) in teaching/learning processes (Cobb, McClain, de Silva Lamberg, & Dean, 2003; Squire, MaKinster, Barnett, Luehmann & Barab, 2003). The aim of this study is to understand the role that teachers ascribe to context as it relates to their own teaching, in their own classes – how teachers see the relationship between school culture and their daily teaching practice. The curricular areas examined in this research are mathematics and science which, unlike the humanities, are typically thought of as "constant" and unaffected by context (e.g., at any context 1+1=2 and e=mc2). The focus on those subject areas makes it possible to learn more about the connections between daily teaching practices and the context in which they occur. This research points to contextual elements (e.g., school policy, students' characteristics, parents, community) that teachers indicate as significant to their daily teaching practices. The findings from this research will contribute to teachers' professional training and development programs, to school principals, and to the self-awareness and reflection of teachers.

This research derives its basis from the field of comparative anthropology (Barton, 1996). The basic assumption is that comparative knowledge of more than one culture (or sub-culture) makes one more aware and therefore better able to describe a single cultural context. This research is composed of ten case studies, each involving experienced teachers who taught for over five years in one school and then moved to teach in another school (i.e. teachers who are familiar with the sub-cultures of at least two schools). The main data sources are interviews with teachers and analysis of their narratives regarding the context elements pertinent to their daily teaching practices in their own classes.

Most of teachers declared that they had never before considered this issue (what "school elements" infiltrate their classrooms) and that, intuitively, they think they behave and teach in the same way in different schools/classrooms. However, during the interviews all the teachers mentioned differences in the way they taught in different schools and linked their teaching practices to contextual elements. The elements which were mentioned as affecting teaching practices are the school's official policy (e.g., policies regarding students' absence - only in one school were such issues expressed in the lessons themselves), students' characteristics in each school (e.g., when integrating in the lesson examples from the students' lives, which may differ from school to school), and the parents' expectations (e.g., the parents in one school want learning to focus more on experiences than on "book learning", even at the expense of reducing the amount of study material covered).