THE JOURNEY HOME: ODYSSEY-BASED THEATRICAL PLAY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF HOME, RELATIONSHIPS, AND BELONGING IN A MULTIPLE-CASE PILOT STUDY

Eleni Konstandinidou, Panagoula Papadimitropoulou, Artemis Giotsa, Eleni Andreou

Abstract


Home is both a material place and a relational setting shaped by memory, emotion, everyday activity, and belonging. This exploratory qualitative multiple-case study examined how 15 participants aged 6–14 years, described for the purposes of the study as having mild cognitive difficulties, represented home before and after an eight-week Odyssey-based theatrical-play programme. Participants were organised into three age groups (6–8, 9–11, and 12–14 years; n = 5 per group). Before the programme, each participant drew a house, a tree, and a person and responded to four open-ended questions after each drawing. The tree and person materials were used only as contextual elicitation. After 16 theatrical-play sessions, the house task and the same four questions were repeated. Analysis treated drawings and verbal accounts as related but distinct sources of evidence and focused on observable elaboration, human presence, relationships, emotional meaning, narrative organisation, and visual–verbal convergence. Simple counts and percentages were used only for clearly identifiable verbal patterns. Explicit named family or interpersonal relationships in the house account were present in 7 of 15 baseline cases (46.7%) and in 10 of 15 post-intervention cases (66.7%). Six post-intervention accounts (40.0%) spontaneously incorporated named Odyssey-related characters or places despite the neutral post-test instruction. Case material also showed that change was heterogeneous: some representations became more environmentally or socially situated, whereas others showed stronger narrative organisation or closer visual–verbal integration. Findings are interpreted as preliminary representational patterns, not as evidence of treatment efficacy.

Keywords


theatrical play; educational drama; Odyssey; home; belonging; children’s drawings; mild cognitive difficulties; embodied learning; multiple-case study; child voice

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejse.v12i7.7005

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