This case study investigated teaching experience in an elementary school with 425 pupils and 14 teachers. The study views teaching not only in the context of the classroom but also in the organizational context of the school and school district and in the sociocultural context of the community. It is an ethnographic study concerned with the interdependence of teaching behavior, beliefs about the teacher's role, and institutional settings. Specifically, it deals with the cultural processes that define and structure the role of the teacher as technician and socialization agent and with teachers' responses to such processes. The impression produced by the study is that teachers evolve responses to all levels of their occupational experience--ideological, organizational, and interpersonal--in relative isolation. This contextual isolation is shown to exist because there is no functioning relationship between the process of teaching and the ideological and organizational framework in which teaching takes place. (Author)