The Use Of Art Therapy Among Male Teachers Of Students With Learning Disabilities In Saudi Arabia

Students with learning disabilities experience difficulties in social, emotional, and academic achievement. These problems are due to the lack of communication skills that influence the students’ way of interacting with other individuals in their learning environment. Art therapy, which uses the creative process of art making to improve a person’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being, has been introduced and utilised as an effective tool to help people to overcome the problem which they encounter. Thus, the primary goal of this study was to examine the factors that influence the use of art therapy among special education teachers who are teaching students with learning disabilities in Saudi Arabia. Other goal of this study was to examine the support system and the attitudes of the special education teachers towards the use of art therapy. In order to achieve these goals, this study was designed with both quantitative and qualitative approaches in which 233 special education teachers who are teaching students with learning disabilities in Saudi Arabia were randomly selected from the population of this study to constitute the quantitative sample of the study (using questionnaire). 10% of these respondents (23 teachers) were involved in the semi-structured interviews to support the quantitative findings. For the purpose of data analysis, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) has been used to analyse the quantitative data of the questionnaires. The thematic analysis technique was used to analyse the interview data