Pre-service teachers' understandings, skills and dispositions as global, culturally literate citizens and agents of change have arguably never been more important. Professional standards, systemic policies and frameworks and a broad range of scholarly perspectives on culture position pre-service teachers to take up cultural education in sometimes conflicting ways. It is these orientations to culture within a teacher education program and how they sit alongside potentially incongruent policies, practices and worldviews that are the focus of this paper. The practitioner research draws on cultural identity theories, policies and pre-service teacher experiences in the teaching and learning of an undergraduate education subject entitled Education for Cultural Diversity at a regional Australian university. Through discursive analysis of policy and pre-service teacher surveys this paper explores tensions that arise in navigating cultural constructs with pre-service teachers.