In this keynote address, I am going to address the issues of culture as a central agency for contemporary change, by raising a number of meaningful questions related to responsive cultural encounters in education. Culture is an issue close to the heart of contemporary education, yet there seems to be both a need, as well as some fatigue in the education community, over the debates about the place of culture in education.

At the same time, we are witnessing a world climate that is currently urging the global community to come up with solutions to a number of very complex issues which in many ways are larger than ourselves. I will in this talk invite us to think about the anatomy of culture, as it may contain the components of intentional actions, our practices, and the functions of our work, that bring change through the action and processes in cultural know-how. I will attempt at untangling some of these issues, by drawing on the experiences of our international research community.