This praxis article outlines the value of using a critical and dialogical model (CDM) to teach multicultural social justice education to preservice teachers. Based on practitioner research, the article draws on the author's own teaching experiences to highlight how key features of CDM can be used to help pre-service teachers move beyond thinking about multicultural education as ethnic tidbits. Illustrative examples of CDM-in-use demonstrate that learning about multicultural social justice education is a social and developmental process that requires teacher educators to scaffold complex ideas by using dialogical approaches to learning that incrementally build on emergent and shared knowledge.