The research reported here looks critically at what student teachers think about diversity. Their home neighbourhoods, their undergraduate university, the schools which they themselves attended and their placement schools are cumulatively responsible for engendering their attitude to diversity which can cause conflict. How teachers from diverse backgrounds react to the same sorts of questions about diversity – religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity, will create a parallel data set with which to begin to interrogate differences between what people believe and how they put their thoughts into practice. Teachers’ professional identities are closely tied to the ways in which they see themselves and how they think others perceive their work. Diversity can cause teachers to rethink the ways in which they position themselves on ‘micro political’ terms within their schools and more widely in society. Ethnographic methods help to generate data making use of both interviews and observations, written assignments as well as participation in focus groups It is hoped that the research will provide an opportunity for two separate sets of data to set side by side and analyzed. A definition of diversity embedded in the words and experiences of ‘diverse’ teachers and those who do no fall in that category.