One of the greatest challenges of any K-12 teacher education program is providing pre-service teachers opportunities to work with students who are culturally and linguistically different from themselves. Despite best efforts of selecting texts and facilitating discussions, new teachers recently interviewed report that coursework just did not help them to prepare for the diversity in their classrooms. The new teachers call for changes in their training and help in finding ways to work with diverse students. Preparing future teachers for diverse classrooms is compounded when there is locally a lack of racial and economic diversity among all of the students, both pre-service teachers and K-12 students. However, this is not an impossible situation to surmount. With creative and purposeful partnerships, future teachers can receive more than a textbook introduction to diversity. In this article, the authors describe the practices of two departments within the same college of education, one focused on preparing elementary teachers (K-8), and one focused on secondary teachers (5-12). The authors share two ways their departments, and in particular their literacy courses, have purposely partnered with schools whose demographics differ significantly from that of their students. (Contains 4 figures.)