The article focuses on metaphors used in science education research to conceptualise culture and on the implications such conceptualisations have for structuring the inferences and actions of both teachers and researchers. The author critiques an older view of culture(s) along with the related set of metaphors, such as cultural borders, gaps, mismatch, conflict, and tension. This view, as the author argues, sees culture as a bounded and coherent set of beliefs and practices associated with a distinct social world, and despite its explanatory usefulness ignores various important phenomena. A set of alternative metaphors about culture is thus proposed, namely culture as funds of knowledge, third space, and figured world. The author considers them more helpful in preparing science teachers for the complexity of schools and classrooms, as the view of culture they convey is that of something porous, dynamic and emergent.