Paper short abstract:

This contribution will highlight how ‘diversity’ in terms of ethnicity, gender and class is articulated in some teacher education programmes in Sweden.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution is based on a project called <i>Teacher Education in ‘multicultural’ Sweden, class, gender and ethnicity</i> where five researcher have studied a number of colleges with a variety of methods and utilising different kinds of material.

Sweden is officially proclaimed to be a multicultural society where diversity is said to be an important and a ‘natural’ aspect of contemporary Swedish life. Teacher education constitutes the largest college/university programme in Sweden with around ten thousand new students every year. Teacher education is routinely described as the most important in the country and ‘diversity’ is high on the official agenda. But what is meant by ’diversity’ in teacher education and how is it perceived, articulated and reproduced by different kinds of actors? In teacher education ‘diversity’ is a vague and ambiguous concept which is used and perceived of in many different and often contradictory ways. There has also been a shift from an articulation of ‘diversity’ as a collective ethnic identity to more individual one, mirroring a more general shift in society. In most of the programmes we studied teacher education students with a ‘non-Swedish’ background came to be seen as representatives of diversity, However, in one programme with a strong multicultural profile, this was not the case. But even here there was not deeper analysis of diversity in Sweden or in education. Instead the students – often with diverse ethnic backgrounds – were encouraged to cultivate their own individuals identity. There is quite a lot of attention on gender in Swedish teacher education, but class is seldom brought out.

As an anthropologist it has been very interesting to study and analyse teacher education and ‘diversity’. But it has also been discouraging to realise how little impact anthropological theory has had on this important programme and how marginalised our discipline is when it comes to debate ‘differences’/’similarities’. What lessons can be learned from this project?