2025 Theses Doctoral

A Mixed Methods Study of Community College Dance Educators

Dougherty, Heather Colleen

This study examines the attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors of community college dance educators offering insights into community college dance programming more broadly.

The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study is to identify and describe dance educators at community colleges by obtaining quantitative data from a survey of current teachers and then following up with purposefully selected individuals to explore those results more in-depth through qualitative portraiture. Conceptually, this study establishes a community college dance education research agenda and lays the groundwork for further research. This study establishes a knowledge base that extends beyond the immediate experiences of the teachers, with implications for the wider fields of community college and postsecondary dance education.

The integrated quantitative and qualitative findings of this study yielded four key themes. First, community college dance educators maintain a multiplicity of roles inside and outside the institution. Second, while the participants of this study believe that both student dance performance opportunities and somatic practices provide transformative learning opportunities and contribute to student persistence, in consideration of their intrinsic educational value, the former are perceived as critical components of the dance curricula and the latter as ancillary.

Third, though their styles may differ, community college dance educators believe they provide mentoring to their dance students that moves their roles beyond the delivery of technical dance training and content knowledge toward the teaching of transferable life skills. Lastly, community college dance educators employ individualized instruction and assessment strategies in their teaching as the circumstances of their classroom environments force teachers to hold multiple pedagogical priorities at once.