This article draws on recent research in schools as part of the "Rethinking Multiculturalism/ Reassessing Multicultural Education" (RMRME) Project, which involved teachers undertaking professional learning framed by these ideas and then designing and implementing action research projects to address issues of concern in their schools. The reduced politics of recognition that often inform teaching practices and the notion of cultural intelligence as it might apply to teacher professionalism are explored. Focusing on two of these action research projects, this article examines the benefits that accrue as teachers in one school adopt and apply this mode of thought in building partnerships with LBOTE (language background other than English) parents. This is compared with another in which teachers adopt a professionalism that disavows their role as intellectuals, resulting in a project which simply reaffirms a notion of culture as difference and does little more than promote the ethos of unreflexive civility that the authors argue is characteristic of existing multiculturalism.