Path of Science: International Electronic Scientific Journal

This article explores the therapeutic potential of children's fairy tales in an intercultural context, viewed through the lens of contemporary cultural and educational practices in working with Ukrainian children temporarily residing outside Ukraine. The relevance of this research stems from the need to identify humanitarian approaches that combine support for creative self-expression, the preservation of Ukrainian linguistic and cultural identity, and the development of intercultural communication in the context of forced displacement. Fairy-tale therapy is considered an interdisciplinary narrative practice that integrates psychological, pedagogical, cultural studies and literary approaches, and goes beyond the traditional use of fairy tales as a means of psychological support. This article aims to provide a theoretical justification and description of a multimodal model of fairy-tale therapy in intercultural work with Ukrainian children, based on the implementation of an international creative and educational project in Austria. The empirical basis of the study consisted of materials from the 'Intercultural Fairy Tale Therapy Project for Youth from Ukraine and Austria', implemented in Vienna as part of the Culture Moves Europe grant programme, funded by the European Union and implemented by the Goethe-Institut, as well as original fairy tales, illustrations, translations, a theatrical adaptation and materials from creative workshops. The study utilised descriptive, narrative, interpretative and cultural studies methods, analysis of creative outputs, pedagogical observation and case studies. The study substantiates a multimodal model of fairy-tale therapy that combines verbal-narrative, visual-imagery, communicative-reflective, translation-intercultural and performative components. The practical significance of this work lies in the potential to apply the proposed model in the activities of educational institutions, cultural centres, libraries, non-governmental organisations, and international projects. The research findings demonstrated the potential of multimodal fairy-tale therapy as a means of creative self-expression, preserving Ukrainian linguistic and cultural identity, and developing intercultural dialogue.

A promising direction for further research is an interdisciplinary study of the corpus of original children's fairy tales created as part of the project, taking into account linguistic, narratological, psycholinguistic and cultural aspects, as well as the further validation of the multimodal fairy-tale therapy model in international cultural and educational practice and an analysis of how it functions in different sociocultural contexts.

fairy-tale therapy; fairy-tale narrative; cultural adaptation; multimodality; children's creativity; intercultural communication

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