In Sweden, the discourse of diversity has become widespread and various government bills, official reports and policy documents, have used the concept of diversity to include aspects of ethnicity, gender equality, social justice, sexuality and physical disabilities. Depending on the context of the issue, these categories are expressed differently. For example, the question of recruiting new categories of students to higher education has been treated both as a matter of civil rights (i.e, the inclusion of people formerly excluded from the arenas of higher learning is seen to be a matter of protecting the rights of the individual) and perhaps more commonly, as a means of improving the quality of education (i.e the university system itself is said to benefit from the inclusion of difference). In the teacher education bill put forward by the Swedish government in 2000, the discourse of diversity is used as an argument for the transformation of the national teacher education. Immigration is said to pose new challenges to the schools, and the Bill therefore demands that teachers develop new pedagogical skills in order to cope with cultural diversity. It also calls for the recruitment of immigrant academics. The expressed belief here is that immigrant teachers can function as role models for immigrant pupils, pointing however also to the fact that the government is more concerned with how people can be used, rather than how "new Swedes" can be given a fair chance on the labour market. The Bill also calls for the recruiting of men in order to compensate for the lack of them in pre-school education. In this fashion, the discourse of diversity produces individuals as bearers of a fixed set of qualities, qualities that are believed to be required in the reformed teacher education. Parallel with the discourse of diversity, a discourse of change is also present in the Bill. When describing the need to reform teacher education, society and its inhabitants are said to be undergoing rapid changes that demand of the new teachers that they are flexible and alert and capable of teaching in new environments and for different end-users. They should be prepared to act not only within the school system, but as a consequence of the lifelong learning, also outside it. Learning is believed to be everywhere in the "knowledge society". Through the discourses of change and diversity a quite contradictory image of the "new teacher" emerges, namely a teacher which is constantly in a state of reconstitution, but which also bears some essential characteristics, e.g being immigrant. I have conducted in-depth interviews with ten student teachers that show that the above discourses are important in self-presentation. The interviews took place at the early stages of the students' education and the themes of our discussions were; why they had chosen to partake in the teacher education, what their thoughts were on the education thus far, and how they conceived their future in the education and in the profession. In the students´ narratives the discourses of change and diversity recurred in ways that concurred with the ambiguous picture painted above, but also in ways which gave new meaning to them. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze this process via a discourse analytical framework building on the ideas of the political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.