Over the past twenty years, the literature in teacher education has built a discourse around diversity. Much of it is predicated on the vast multicultural education literature developing since the late 1970s, a literature that is very much activist- and advocacy-oriented. It is also a literature largely ignored by “traditional” academics, ostensibly because education is a low-status academic interest,1 and also because arguing against the multicultural education discourse is a very unpopular thing to do. In this article, I delve into the largely ignored teacher education literature to find the meaning of diversity as it is conveyed there. In doing so, I develop the idea that diversity in teacher education acts as a double helix.
As long as they maintain accreditation, many teacher education programs and schools of education in general have carte blanche to do what they want, and
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