Chapter 18: Mentoring Black Pre-Service Teachers to the Classroom: An Othermothering/Otherparenting Approach

Lynnette was in the car making a 3-hour round-trip drive just to drop off a study book to Jacinta (pseudonyms used throughout) for her teaching certification exam and thinking about this long journey. This book, plastic spiral binding and bent pages, had already made a journey from the headquarters of Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, NJ to our Historically Black college/university (HBCU) in southern Chester County, PA. From there, it made an hour and 15-minute journey in Emery’s car to Lynnette’s house in Philadelphia. Lynnette took the book from her house for the long car ride to Jacinta’s student-teaching site in northern New Jersey in order for her to have the study materials for the certification exam she needed to pass. The book’s long journey is symbolic of the long, sometimes winding, pathway that Black pre-service teachers (college education majors) take in order to become licensed teachers.