This professor of preservice teachers challenges her students to expand their understanding of "culture" beyond racially specific contexts and into the many roles people play within the communities to which they belong. To provide her students with support as they work to teach literature in ways that are relational as well as context-specific, Emily Meixner has developed a scaffolded series of community-based questions that begin by focusing on the text's protagonist and move increasingly toward a closer analysis of the various contextual (local, regional, national, racial, religious, language, etc.) communities to which the protagonist belongs and with which she or he identifies. Once these communities have been identified and examined, students look at the extended communities to which she or he does not belong and analyze their significance in the text as well as in the protagonist?s experiences. The class considers which communities have the most social and institutional power, why, and how that power is either challenged or maintained. Having moved progressively away from the protagonist to build a complex portrait of the world in which she or he lives, students then return to this character and discuss the ways in which all of these communities have impacted his or her understanding of personal identity and agency. A graphic representation of what this looks like is presented in this article. (Contains 1 figure.)