Mentorship is a cornerstone for graduate student success. Depending on the discipline, graduate mentorship demands different approaches. 

Each year, the Graduate College recognizes faculty who have demonstrated a commitment to mentorship. This year’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award recipients are Professor Jennifer Kayle in the Department of Dance and Professor Christine Ogren in the College of Education. 

Mentorship as a two-way street

First as Co-Director and then Director of Graduate Studies in dance for almost 15 years, Kayle remains committed to ushering dance artists into academia and supporting them on their journey as dance makers, performers, and educators.

“I believe mentorship is a two-way street,” Kayle says. “I feel that my life has been deeply enriched by being in contact with these very serious artists.” 

Kristin Marrs, associate professor of instruction in dance, graduated with her MFA in dance at the University of Iowa in 2012. Throughout her time at Iowa as a student and a professor, Kayle has provided a steadfast current of support.

“Transitioning from working in a ballet company setting for a decade to moving into academia, Jennifer provided a lot of encouragement,” Marrs says. “She helped me understand what it is to make choreography and to find my choreographic voice.”

Kayle’s lifetime of research in dance improvisation influences how she approaches mentorship, centering responsiveness and attending to the present moment and individual.

“Jennifer pays attention to the students who come through the door,” Marrs says. “She’s not trying to make a one-size-fits-all program. Rather, she lets the dance program adapt to the needs of people who are coming in while still having a clear program identity.”

Adaptability is important as the field of dance changes and the needs of students change with it.

“There needs to be a center of gravity to a program, but at the same time all of that grounding needs to have a huge dose of friendliness toward change and idiosyncrasy,” Kayle says.

Dancing with inquiry

Kayle’s research centers dance as a mode of inquiry, which is a way of working that she invites her students to take seriously. 

“I believe in the idea of inquiry, meaning you don't know the answers at the outset of the choreographic process,” Kayle describes. “I’m keen on a rigorous process that may entail a failed outcome. I welcome valiant failures on the way to learning something.” 

Kayle describes how she draws inspiration from dancers’ commitment and vulnerability throughout this process. “What we're doing is not easy. Dancers are my favorite people because they have this kind of grit and courage,” Kayle says. 

This semester Kayle is on sabbatical focusing on a research project entitled Ageing Virtuosity. This choreographic research involves a solo for the concert stage created with collaborator, Professor Pamela Vail at Franklin and Marshall College and a dance film with University of Iowa Dance MFA alumni Tori Lawrence and Ellie Goudie-Averill.

“How do you define virtuosity in new contexts when in the field of dance virtuosity is all but synonymous with athleticism and a kind of pyrotechnic, explosive physicality,” Kayle says. “What does virtuosity have to do with maturity? How can years and years of experience be seen in a dance, or in the dancing of an older performer? How is that perceived?”

Kayle speaks to the impact of watching dance graduate students like Marrs, Lawrence, and Goudie-Averill among many others evolve throughout their career. 

“It means a lot to me that many grads remain in my life and stay in touch through updates, collegiate conversations, and sometimes as collaborators,” Kayle says. 

“Nothing can replace when you get to see past students build on or diverge from what they did initially as graduate students. It is such a gift to witness that and to have anything to do with it.”

Learning from the past

Throughout her nearly 26 years at Iowa, Ogren has developed her mentorship style in a way that reflects her background and experiences. Like Kayle, she believes that mentorship should be adaptable, and she recognizes that every graduate student needs something different.

“With graduate students, it’s such an individualized process. It’s about meeting students where they are and helping them to grow, advance, and find their scholarly voice,” Ogren explains.

She also believes in holding students to high expectations and helping them achieve new heights. For Ogren, it’s not just about providing careful and detailed feedback on work. The mentorship process involves believing that students can achieve goals they might not have thought possible, especially with good support.

Lisa Nakahara, one of Ogren's advisees, will be graduating with her PhD this spring. Throughout her journey as a graduate student, Ogren was there to support her at every step, even driving her to Chicago to attend a national conference and introducing her to a renowned scholar in the field.  

"Dr. Ogren has been a constant source of support over the past five years. Whether I was struggling to adjust in the beginning, seeking guidance in my research, or presenting at a conference, she was always there," she says.

An interdisciplinary approach

As a professor in the Educational Policy and Leadership Studies department, Ogren’s mentorship also extends into the classroom. She teaches courses on the history of K-12 and higher education. 

“I’ve taught history to a lot of graduate students who think they don’t like history. They’re typically not people who signed up to study history. I like engaging them and helping them think like historians,” Ogren says. 

“It’s not about memorizing dates. It’s about analyzing evidence and making sound scholarly arguments, which helps them no matter what they specialize in.”

Ogren, a historian of education, examines the history of teacher education, schoolteachers, and women and other marginalized students and the higher education institutions they attend.

Her first book explored the history of state normal schools which were created to train teachers and would later become regional state universities. Normal schools were often more accessible to women and students whose families had few resources. 

“My work has helped to change how historians of higher education talk about education for students from less advantaged backgrounds,” she describes.

This fall, Ogren’s new book, Summers Off: A History of U.S. Teachers’ Other Three Months, will be published by Rutgers University Press. In the book, Ogren explores how teachers from the 1880s to 1930s, many of whom were young unmarried women, furthered their development and professionalization through coursework, other jobs, and even traveling.

Although Ogren’s master's and PhD are both in educational policy studies, her undergraduate degree was in history. Ogren believes that her experiences in the humanities and as a historian among social scientists have shaped how she mentors her students. 

“I’ve adapted my mentorship skills to cross borders between social sciences and humanities,” she explains. 

Traditional mentorship in the social sciences involves graduate students co-authoring papers with faculty, but the humanities and history fields often produce more solo works. Ogren’s students don’t typically write papers with her. Instead, she helps shape their ideas into articles and supports them as the author. 

Ogren's feedback is something Nakahara appreciates most about working with her. Throughout her PhD, Nakahara submitted multiple writing pieces to Ogren, including conference proposals, grant applications, and her dissertation. Ogren provided detailed feedback on every piece.

"Her comments consistently helped me strengthen my arguments. After reflecting on her suggestions and revising my work, my overall argument, supporting points, and topic sentences became much clearer. I truly feel that my writing skills have improved significantly since the beginning of my PhD," she says. 

For Ogren, it is a privilege to work with graduate students, and seeing her students' growth and success is the most rewarding part of her job.

“Having been with them since they came in as new PhD students and seeing them complete their dissertation, defend it, graduate, and launch into their careers bring a lot back to the mentor,” she says.

Passing down mentorship legacies

The value systems Kayle and Ogren carry into their mentorship are grounded in experiences with their own mentors.

“I try to live up to the mentorship I experienced,” Kayle describes. “My mentors taught me that art making is situated within a life, within a perspective, within a history, within the specifics of the land where you grew up and the culture where you grew up.” 

“They made me feel seen as a whole person, and I hope this plays out in my own mentoring,” Kayle says.

Marrs echoes the importance of recognizing the whole person within mentorship, particularly within the field of dance. “I think mentorship takes an extra degree of care because you're always attending to the person in addition to attending to their work,” Marrs says.

Ogren's mentors inspired her to keep pursuing more. Her mentors encouraged her to complete a PhD after completing her masters. As the first person in her family to receive a graduate degree, Ogren did not picture herself as a professor. 

“I hadn’t thought of myself as someone who would get a PhD, but my mentors encouraged me, engaged me, and challenged me in such a way that I felt like they believed in me and wanted to see where I would go. The way they worked with me made me think that I could get a PhD and be a professor too,” she says. 

Ogren and Kayle’s experiences demonstrate the impact of mentors on students while they are pursuing their degrees and into their professional careers. Both professors hope that they can uplift and support their students in achieving their goals just as their mentors did for them. 

Kayle and Ogren will receive their awards at the Faculty and Staff Awards ceremony in May.