This article chronicles a unique experience the author had while teaching a graduate seminar in southwestern Virginia in the spring of 2001. It was his charge to teach a graduate seminar entitled "Basic Principles and Practices of Multicultural Education" to twenty-three students in their second, final year of an educational leadership cohort at Radford University. For fifteen Mondays, he traveled 150 miles from his home to Abingdon, Virginia, to teach this class. What made this experience unique was the class composition. The students in the leadership cohort were all white Appalachian, while the teacher was a gay Latino male from California. From the beginning, this seminar proved to be an intense exploration of cultural identities and values for both the students and the professor. The author's cultural encounter with this group of southwestern Virginians illustrates the fact that much of what people strive for in the name of multicultural education is rooted in experience, and that it is necessary to continue to develop understandings about diversity and equity education as the world moves forward.