How are socioemotional competencies taught in initial teacher education? Affectivity, learning, and didactics of emotions in the university classroom

Current challenges in education not only require developing skills that go further than solely academic and cognitive ones, but they also include affective and socioemotional demands (OECD, OECD Rev Vocat Educ Train, 2021). Additionally, studies point to a strong relationship between academic success and socioemotional skills (Heckman et al., J Labor Econ 24(3), 2006; Levin, Prospects. UNESCO 43(2):269-284, 2012). These competencies can be understood as emotional intelligence (Salovey et al., Emotional attention, clarity, and repair: Exploring emotional intelligence using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale. In J.W. Pennebaker (Ed.), Emotion, disclosure, and health (pp. 125-154), 1995) and refer to the ability to resolve issues related to emotions and their meaning (Mayer et al., The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp. 528-599). Cambridge University Press, 2011). In acquiring these competencies, teachers and teacher education become key. Our research question is: How are socioemotional competencies taught in high school teacher education programs? The objective is to understand the role of teacher educators in developing socioemotional competencies in teacher training. The design is qualitative, informed by ethnography, and based on eight observations carried out inside the classroom of a university-level teacher education program. Results show that opportunities to address these socioemotional competencies arise in teacher education classroom interaction; still, they are hardly exploited by teacher educators as evidence of an explicit intention to foster them as part of their classroom practices was not observed. Implications related to scripts that support university-level teacher education and the process of building professional identity are discussed.