Effect of Theatre and Drama Practices Course on Social Anxiety

Abstract

Individuals who make up society interact and communicate with their social environment. While the healthy realization of this communication enables the individual to live in harmony with the community, in the opposite case, the individual cannot communicate with their environment and may face many problems in both professional and daily life. This situation can turn into social anxiety. In this work, which aims to analyze the impact of the “Theatre and Drama Practices” course on reducing social anxiety, experimental research design, one of the quantitative research designs, was used, and a one-group pretest-posttest model was used in the experimental design. In the work, which was implement on 45 4th-grade university students who study at Bayburt University School of Education, Department of Turkish Education autumn semester of the 2022-2023 academic year, data were collected with the 12-item Social Anxiety Scale Short Form. In the examination of the data obtained, the data were entered into the computer system and analyzed with the SPSS 18 program. Mean scores and standard deviation values of Turkish teacher candidates were calculated. To compare the data, the t-test for dependent group and t-test for independent group were used. Before the “Theatre and Drama Practices” course, Turkish teacher candidates had moderate social anxiety, and their social anxiety levels didn’t differ significantly by gender; after the “Theatre and Drama Practices” course, Turkish teacher candidates had low social anxiety, and their social anxiety levels didn’t differ significantly by gender. A statistically significant difference was obtained between Turkish teacher candidates’ pre-test and post-test scores in terms of social anxiety. It was defined that the “Theatre and Drama Practices” course effectively reduced the social anxiety levels of teacher candidates.