Emotional intelligence: competencies that contribute to the professional identity of dance educators

Emotional competencies, directly related to the construct of emotional intelligence, are an integral part of educators‘ pedagogical skills and abilities; however, as research shows, they lack in the field of dance education. This research aims to explore the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the development of dance educators’ professional teaching identities.

This multi-level, mixed-method study applied at the first level a quantitative-qualitative sequential research design, employing three different EI approaches to investigate the emotional intelligence level of third-year dance education students . The findings through descriptive statistics and Spearman’s rank regression revealed that the Profile of Emotional Competence (PEC) might be an appropriate tool to
identify dance education students’ and professionals’ strengths and weaknesses among their emotional competencies. Follow-up focus group discussions provided explorative perspectives to deepen the results of the quantitative data set.

At the second level, a multiple case study used a concurrent quantitative and qualitative mixed-methods research design to determine the emotional competencies of four dance education professionals. The study revealed that dance education professionals scored at a high EI level, but exposed differences between the global factors and some subscales of the PEC in reference to length of teaching experience. No significant correlation is found between teaching times and the PEC, the emotional self-efficacy, and the teacher's sense of efficacy. Based on the cognitive competence matrix paradigm of Burch (1970), the findings suggested that the variable length of teaching experience might influence the PEC only within the first five years

To give more depth to the quantitative results, they have been triangulated with self-evaluation reports and semi-structured interviews. Using NVivo software as a useful springboard for developing more analytic-level themes, a follow-up deductive pre-set coding scheme, emerging from Goleman’s EI model (Goleman, 1995) and Jordan's awareness model (Jordan, 2011), has been put into operation. The
findings revealed a deeper awareness of the value of emotional intelligence, instructional strategies,
student-teacher relationships, and tailored development programmes as prerequisites towards the professional teaching identity of dance education professionals.