Behaviour Change towards Sanitation and Education through Art and Drama

According to HEEALS, the CSSD students used dramatisation to communicate important messages in a fun, imaginative, and expressive way in an effort to foster students' understanding of the subject matter. The potency of applied theatre was reflected in that its method was inclusive, and its purpose went beyond language barriers. Through drama conventions such as tableaux (freeze-frames) and role-play, the children were able to grasp the ideas of the topics by investigating elements of the subject areas and communicating how they really felt about these issues. Pictures and keywords were used as stimuli to trigger knowledge, thought, and action in the children, so they could then share their opinions and work together in creating the final story for the piece. In encouraging girl child education and role of sanitation, all the girls were able to come up with a script that described why education and sanitation was important to them. In addition, the children were equipped with performance skills such as improvisation, characterisation, and voice projection.

As noted above, the initiative also incorporated other interactive forms to educate children about sanitation issues, such as poster-making and class decoration competitions with the theme of "Sanitation and Drinking Water" to garner the interests of all children from the school.

Children, Youth, Girls, Health

According to HEEALS, India is the open defaecation capital of the world, where people have more mobile phones than toilets. This is a big concern, but people do not want to talk about it. "People in many part of the villages here make their homes without the toilets as they don't see any use of it even if they have money to build it, instead of this they go out and defecate in the open, without knowing the ill effects and consequences of it on their health and environment."

HEEALS is a civil society organisation, most of whose staff is working on a voluntary or semi-voluntary basis, that is working to provide resources, knowledge, expertise, and leadership to help the people and communities across states of India to use their own resources, skills, abilities, and other assets to improve the quality of life, environment, education, and livelihood and that of future generations. Click here to learn more about HEEALS.