Sandra Stauffer

Professor of Music

Mentoring is a matter of co-navigating the web of experiences that comprise life in academia and in the larger world. Mentor and protégé travel together along and between the threads of the web, with each thread a continuum worth exploring-practical and theoretical perspectives, immediate and long-term goals, wide-angle and close-up views of problems, the inner voice of the scholar and the external voices of the field, and more. Persistent social, cultural, and professional tensions pull at the web and make it an interesting place to live and learn; time and experience change its shape. Time and experience also change the roles of mentor and protégé, who end up, in the best circumstances, as co-learners. How, then, to navigate this complex, shifting dynamic of scholarship, relationship, perspective, and profession? For me, the key has been to attend to constants and contexts, and to know the difference between the two.

Three constants, or principles, underpin the mentoring relationship. First, I view myself and my work as a platform or springboard for students' successes, an idea I first encountered in Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life (1989). Bateson admonishes readers to be conscious of their antecedents-those who have gone before and upon whose work one's successes rest. Becoming a mentor (and one is always becoming) has meant turning Bateson's phrase around and recognizing that I am an antecedent (one of many) for graduate students, and to be effective in this supporting role, I must attend to every dimension of my own work and do it well. A cracked or crumbling foundation will not do; the support is insufficient and connections to other antecedents, who are also crucial to students' success, will not hold. If my work is solid, then what students can accomplish will surpass anything I can imagine. Not only that, but they will be building new platforms that will support future generations of scholars, teachers, leaders, and students.

Second, the principle of psychological safety governs the mentoring relationship and our work together. Graduate students must trust that our work occurs in a space in which they are safe to risk ideas, to grapple with difficult (even intractable) problems, to explore new territory, even to "fail." They must know that I value curiosity and inquisitiveness, that I will not let them go prematurely, unprepared, or alone to places in web that are fraught with peril, and that when they do take risks in their scholarship, teaching or musicianship, I have their backs. Psychological safety means attending to the balance of risk taking and security; insights can occur at any time.

A third principle of mentoring-connection-I learned from my mentors, who were superb at pointing me toward books, ideas, and opportunities that fed my interests and people who supported my teaching, learning, and scholarship. One mentor encouraged graduate students and new faculty members not only to be connected, but also to be in community, telling us often, "Research is a team sport." Networks of connections afford challenges to thinking, shifts in perspective, and rich collaborative possibilities. And sometimes, the value of connections and the importance of community means encouraging a prospective student whose interests are more aligned with a different program to look elsewhere, or directing a current student to a colleague whose research dovetails better with the student's trajectory. In other words, connecting and community means making "our" rather than "my," the pronoun of choice in academic (and mentoring) life.

I set my stakes by these three principles-building a platform for students' successes, providing psychological safety, and developing connections and community. But mentoring also requires flexibility based on contextual elements-those brought by the individual students, those driven by matters of voice and representation in scholarship, and those influenced by the shifting professional, social, and cultural concerns.

Each graduate student brings his or her unique way of seeing, hearing, attending to, and knowing the world to the educational enterprise and mentoring relationship. Individual goals matter; individual insights are valuable. While a general road map through the web of academic experience can be helpful, graduate students travel individual pathways, and mentoring works best when a shift from "I" to "eye" and "ear" occurs-when one attends to patterns in how the student thinks, how he learns, how she synthesizes material, what kinds of question he asks. The mentoring dynamic is a human interaction and works best when it is sensitive to individual differences.

Each graduate student also brings to the educational enterprise, and to scholarship in general, a unique voice-a particular way of parsing a phrase, stringing ideas together, creating a structure, or representing scholarly work. Their voices are their own, and mentoring means listening to their voices, prodding individual growth, creating opportunities for them to consider how their voices are heard and interpreted, and directing them to attend to audience, meaning, and purpose in their writing and speaking. Eventually, these kinds of experiences can help graduate students become critical readers of and listeners to their own voices, and mentors for each other and for new voices.

Finally, everything we do as scholars, mentors, and colleagues occurs in nested and overlapping webs of professional, social, and cultural meanings. Politics, phenomena, and places impact scholarship, thinking, and teaching; the web of experiences that comprise life in academia and the professions stretches and changes. These tensions and shifts draw our attention and make us productive as we respond to and reconsider what we experience. One of the challenges of mentoring is standing alongside graduate students as they turn and look, and point to what they see and hear in the world. Mentoring means traveling alongside students as they explore the dynamics of the web, looking at new places and new ideas, assessing what is working pursuing, and helping them to think about when to push back, when to take a stand, and when to move onward.

An old adage in education (at any level) goes something like this: "Telling is not teaching." Mentor is not telling . . . or teaching. It's listening and learning alongside. It's about the challenge and change. It's about support and substance. It's about exchange and excellence. It's about standing with and standing on one's own. It's about being and becoming. It's about the best job any of us have.