Evaluation of the educational theatre programme gut:gehen of the Walter Blüchert Foundation

The Walter Blüchert Foundation's programme, entitled ‘gut:gehen’, is an extracurricular offering for primary school children in grades 2 to 4. Participation in the programme should help the children to cope with the consequences of the coronavirus lockdown and contribute to their healthy development through targeted support in the psycho-social and emotional areas. The project takes a theatre-pedagogical approach to expand the resonance space of children's own experiences and to balance their body and psyche. For this purpose, the children in a group of 12 pupils are encouraged by two pedagogues in 12 programme units once a week for 90 minutes to deal with their own life situation in a playful way and thus to explore their own values.

The evaluation aims to analyse the quality of the programme in various areas. This concerns the process quality in all phases of the programme: in its conception, development and implementation. Accordingly, five research areas were formulated:

1. reconstruction and scientific processing of the programme's objectives;
2. consideration and assessment of the programme's existing working methods;
3. research into the satisfaction of participants and those involved;
4. investigation of behavioural changes in the participants;
5. analysis of the transferability of the programme and its elements into the school system.

The evaluation of the data collected as part of the evaluation makes it possible to analyse the process quality of the programme in several dimensions (e.g. acceptance / satisfaction with the offer / programme; participants' ideas about the course and effects of the programme; values that are important to the participants with regard to the programme; actions that are taken and behaviour of the participants that should be positively influenced by the programme) and, on this basis, to formulate recommendations for further programme development.