Teaching ethically: reflections on race, class, and teacher education

In a political moment defined by neoliberal reform, curricular regulations, and escalating attacks on public education, preparing teachers requires more than compliance with accountability metrics and externally imposed standards. Technical competence, professional knowledge, and accountability remain essential, but teacher prepartion must cultivate these capacities alongside the critical consciousness, ethical judgement, relational responsibility, and pedagogical creativity necessary to teach students whose lives are shaped by racialized and economically stratified conditions. This article examines teacher education as a site of struggle under neoliberal educational reform, where issues of race and class are often negated. Drawing on autobiographical narrative, critical pedagogy, and sustained pedagogical praxis, I argue for reclaiming classrooms as communities of liberation grounded in ethical responsibility, relational accountability, and structural awareness of race and class. Situating teacher preparation within broader histories of racialized capitalism, policy surveillance, and curricular control, I demonstrate how everyday pedagogical practices – such as autobiographical inquiry, community-building activities, experiential learning, and curriculum rooted in narrative, film, and lived experience – can disrupt meritocratic and technocratic logics. Rather than treating race and class as add-on topics, I frame them as structural realities that shape educational access, belonging, and possibility. Ultimately, I advance a vision of teacher education that prepares educators to teach ethically within unequal and highly regulated schooling contexts.