Recently, developmental educators have argued that we should view students in their full complexities, rather than as “deficits” to be fixed. This position can be actualized in the social sciences sector by retheorizing “culture.” Whereas many common assumptions of anthropology stress semiotic meanings of culture and many sociological approaches focus on structures and processes, we argue that developmental education should include both meaning and structure in understandings of culture. We use a cultural studies framework to combine anthropological and sociological groundings into a model of culture that demands that we first access students’ pre-college lived experiences and understandings, and work with them to expand, rather than replace, their knowledge with the formal discourses that they must master to negotiate academic spaces. In our model, culture is the collaborative practice of continually making and remaking contexts (i.e., structures and meanings) that provide students with dynamic tools to succeed in the academy and beyond.