In 1991, twenty-seven faculty members on the University of Michigan campus came together to talk about our collective struggles with multicultural teaching in our respective disciplines. We found that we had many strengths and challenges in common and we used the opportunity to share strategies, questions, references, and exercises we had found useful in our work with undergraduate and graduate students. Concurrently, a campus-wide group calling itself the Faculty Against Institutional Racism (FAIR) formed in response to widespread incidents of gender, racial, and ethnic discrimination on the campus. This group developed a cadre of distinguished teachers (FAIRteach) who were willing to share their expertise with campus faculty interested in improving their teaching. The original group of 27 faculty members cooperated in the compilation of a volume entitled Multicultural Teaching in the University (Schoem, Frankel, Zuniga, & Lewis, 1993), which incorporated the lessons all had learned from these and other opportunities for multicultural teaching within a large research-oriented University. The interweaving of these 27 voices allowed the faculty participants to return to sometimes hostile environments and struggle with ways of incorporating issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and ability into our scholarship and teaching. Since that time, many of us have continued to develop opportunities to meet with our colleagues to discuss these issues, and have often shared our expertise with other faculty and school administrators on campuses across the country through workshops, seminars, training events, and multicultural organizational development action projects (Douvan, Lewis, Aparicio, & Schoem, 1993; Frankel, 1993). In 1993, I was privileged to serve as a discussant for the Feminism and Family Studies Section's symposium on Impassioned Teaching held at the National Council on Family Relation's annual meeting during which the papers by Thompson, Allen, and Marks were first presented. It was clear to me then, as now, that their papers, incorporating different perspectives on pedagogical approaches, were a part of this same interweaving process. One goal of the process is to help students and faculty understand multicultural teaching as a part of the academic excellence, academic freedom, and critical inquiry enterprises of the 1990s global perspective on higher education (hooks, 1994; Mattai, 1992; Schoem et al., 1993). Academic freedom, academic excellence, and critical inquiry, as can be gleaned from these articles, have multiple definitions, not a single, narrow one, as is claimed by detractors of multicultural teaching (National Association of Scholars, 1988; Steele, 1989). Although these three articles are focused on areas of family studies, the authors also address larger themes that have importance across academic and practice disciplines. The purpose of this commentary is to illuminate some of these themes, their theoretical bases, and their importance in multicultural teaching about families. Through the presentation of these themes, some of the criticism of multicultural teaching and, indeed, a multicultural perspective itself, will be addressed in an attempt to further the dialogue among all who participate in instruction about families. COMMON THEMES People Teaching for Change Multicultural teaching has as one of its basic tenets a praxis perspective, that is, a focus on simultaneous critical self-reflection and action (Freire, 1972; Lather, 1986; Lewis, 1993). The praxis philosophy has been written about most eloquently by Paulo Freire (1972, 1994), whose work has influenced many others who have subsequently written about multicultural teaching (Butler & Schmitz, 1992; hooks, 1994; Schoem et al., 1993). Gramsci, the Italian philosopher of the 20th century, suggested that educators form groups to address the ways in which their teaching informed and was informed by their world views (Lather, 1986). …