Effects of Rabindrik Drama Play on Self Esteem of Students with Learning Disabilities

Psychological and behavioral processes in health and illness, is a major concern for health psychologists in modern era. Psychological factors including environmental stressors, thoughts, beliefs and anxiety can affect health directly. Health psychologists are constructively working and applying their knowledge to reduce these adverse effects and to improve health by working directly with individual patients or indirectly in large scale public health programs. Factors like self confidence, self esteem and communicative skills which definitely contribute to physical health can be enhanced and brought into focus using technique like “role play” or drama. Role play is an effective and innovative activity which involves patients or participants in a real-life problem situation along with the desire for resolution and understanding that this involvement endangers. It helps participants to built up their confidence, manage their emotional control, enhance their verbal and non verbal communication skills, decision making capability, increasing their self esteem and decorating their overall personality. Present study aims to examine the effect of role play on the self esteem of the learning disabled students facing learning difficulties in academics. Students facing learning difficulties have very low self esteem, low self confidence, unable to respond easily and lacking verbal and non verbal communication skills. A quasi experimental pre-test post-test design was used with control and experimental group with four participants each. The famous story named “Kabuliwala” written by “Rabindranath Tagore” was used as a tool for role play. Number of participants in control and experimental group was decided on the basis of characters portrayed in story. Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale (1965) was used to measure self esteem of the students. Mean scores of pre test and post test on self esteem was examined through t-test.