Prison education seems to be a very neglected field. Many inmates do not have any opportunity to develop themselves due to various barriers – be it system barriers, local ones within penitentiary units, etc. Very often it is thought that prisoners should not be given a second chance to rehabilitate. Many of these prisoners are extremely talented and skilled, especially artistically. Art seems to play a very important part of their lives. They can express themselves, they can “create” their own world and at the same time they can spend their time more productively. The project that we want to develop intends to inspire prison educators to use art education in prisons as a vehicle to “smuggle” basic skills into informal learning in EU prisons. Our project is designed to facilitate the process through which economically or socially disadvantaged groups of society (namely prisoners, in our case) could start acquiring or developing their skills while doing artistic activities. By saying ‘skills’ we mean not only tangible skills, e.g. based on artistic formats, IT, mathematical or literacy skills but also developing features that are intangible, i.e. personal skills – self-confidence, sensitiveness or sensibility, etc. Our project ,,Art as means to develop low skilled inmates” aims to strengthen the capacity of the European institutions and organizations by sharing learning and good practice examples of informal education through different means in order to effectively represent interests of the economically or socially disadvantaged groups. The project is based on a creative scheme involving prison tutors and a number of other outer institutions in participating project countries. The project offers informal and creative learning opportunities for prisoners through a series of trainings, workshops, lessons, etc. These learning opportunities all revolve around artistic activities. Activities will be planned in such a way that inmates will also acquire basic skills (we assume that some of those skills will be learned automatically, unwittingly). The strategic goal is the possibility of organizing additional classes/activities/workshops for prisoners whose educational offer in prisons is limited. Thanks to the project inmates will receive a broadened educational offer and in the end – they will gain new skills. Also, when talking about prison educators, they will get the chance to flourish as an educational leader, and to maximise the impact of their work within the prison education environment. Participants/educators will also exchange their practices and ideas about teaching adult inmates basic skills while doing arts.
The project "Art as means to develop low skilled inmates" proved to be a successful undertaking. The issue addressed in “Art as means to develop low skilled inmates” is the possibility of teaching prisoners basic skills through artistic activities. We managed to conduct several interesting workshops that normally prisoners would not have a chance to take part in. Since social rehabilitation in majority of penal units across EU is quite a neglected field, our project was a remedy to counteract in this area. We offered inmates the following undertakings (and thanks to that we managed to teach them basic skills that they lacked or had a low level of): • Classes with target group on textile pieces, • Classes on using words, to express ethos of ethnic group, • Writing a book of personal stories illustrated by students, • Making cards with wishes workshop, • Identifying suitable QQI (Quality and Qualifications in Ireland) exam modules, • A huge poster was done with pictures about Erasmus+ project, • Two blogs in both languages about the project (https://artasmeanstodeveloplowskillsinmates.blogspot.com/; https://artedein.blogspot.com/) • A newsletter about inmates’ accomplishments, • Workshops with inmates on making and writing cards and postcards, • Noticeboards made in the Spanish lessons, • Patchwork workshops, • Lettering to celebrate the International day of the book, • Calligraphy classes, • Workshop - Stained glass window making, • Activity book with basic mathematical problems was prepared. This was used as a base to start a workshop (Stained glass window making) – one of the therapists started a maths course and taught the group of inmates’ basics of maths, • Making the model of a village (made of wood, cardboard paper and other stationery materials), • Making a video of a “life in a village” (using the mentioned above model). Before that there was a workshop on IT tools usage (mainly ‘how to make a video’ tools), • Learning/Teaching Event in Poland for prison educators. We estimate that across the whole partnership there were about 200 inmates involved in all our doings. It is not easy to provide with a rigid number of beneficiaries - one should be aware that the number of participants of any activities in prisons may fluctuate due to the fact of complexity of the environment. If it comes to the educators who were the leaders of the project, each partner institution had two such persons. Additionally there were (on average) three other educators/trainers who were involved directly on indirectly into the process of the project. Thanks to the implemented ideas majority of involved prisoners managed to increase their basic skills. Not only hard ones but the soft skills, too, which we think is also of great importance. One of the most desired long term effect of our activities that we could mention here is the fact that inmates who took part in our project, thanks to being better educated, will contribute to reduce re-offending. We believe that our project had an extremely positive and concrete influence on the participants. They will see that one can choose a different path in their lives – different from the one chosen so far, namely felonious. Another long term impact that it is worth mentioning is impact on prison educators. We see our project as an opportunity to share our knowledge and experience gained within the project time with other teachers working in prisons during and after the project. We strongly believe this might be a good example to be innovative to support the growth and development of the prison education profession across Europe.