It is essential for teachers and teacher educators alike to understand how teachers conceptualize multicultural education. It is such understandings that will help a teacher education program meet the real needs of both the teachers and their students. After all, it is the teacher who works with diversity in the classroom and who must make informed decisions about all students' learning. In this study, the authors attempt to understand how language teachers and literacy teachers conceptualize multicultural education by analyzing their writings, and specifically looking at their use of multicultural metaphors. They believe that language, literacy, and culture are intertwined, and therefore it is important to understand how language teachers view the role of different cultures in teaching and learning. They asked graduate students, most of whom were already teachers, in two teacher-education programs--Teaching Literacy and TESOL--to create a metaphor that portrays the multicultural characteristics of American culture and the important aspects which they believe constitute multicultural education. From the analysis of the teacher writings, the authors were able to categorize five different conceptualizations of multicultural education, which are discussed in this article and considered in comparison with other theoretical models. (Contains 1 table.)