This article demonstrates how life history methods can be used to trace preservice teachers' emergent ethics toward teaching for equity and social justice. Through qualitative analyses of 10 European American, middle-class, female preservice teachers' life history interviews, access to diverse individuals and diverse materials was identified as a major theme in participants' understandings of teaching. The development of this approach to understanding teaching for equity--an ethics of access--is traced through the life history of one preservice teacher, Julie Robbins. Implications and limitations that an ethics of access presents to teacher education are posed and explored. (Contains 2 notes.)