Access to lifelong learning as a principle of equal opportunity, in accordance with the 1st key principle of the European Pillar of Social Rights, as recalled by the Council of the European Union in its recommendations of 22 May 2018, is the basis of our ambition to enable all detained persons to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to reintegrate a position in their own society once released. Providing a common thread to all educational actions, social integration is therefore seen as the very reason of the presence of our French teaching structures intervening in a prison environment. Despite an educational context which is heavily impacted by damaging discontinuities in life courses and due to multiple factors (among others, high turnover rate of people, large heterogeneity of learners, numerous constraints inherent to the operations inside a prison) the same requirements and the same references as those used in a free environment remain all the more essential to provide the learners with a central role, aiming at offering equal opportunities and ensuring the relevance as well as the quality of the training offer. This is why teachers inside prisons, even more than in an open environment, are expected to contribute to a constant restructuring of the proposed training offers by ceaselessly updating their own training and their teaching practices. The present project of establishing a time of reflection and a collective, firmly European work in a partnership context will allow to provide educational responses that are expected to minimize the negative impact of the discontinuity of the learning course on detainees. The European partners that are resolutely included in the process of this ambitious project are: - The Teaching Unit of the Auergne-Rhône-Alpes Region (France) - The Department of Education of the Penitentiary Center of Gherla (Romania) - The Nelson Mandela Adult Public Education Institution (EPAPU) of the A Lama Prison (Spain). - The CPIP, non-governmental organization, aiming at cooperation and innovation in the field of penitentiary action (Romania) What is expected through this two-year collaborative work is a collective attempt during six transnational meetings aiming at: - strengthening our respective and mutual knowledge of the existing penitentiary systems in the different countries, - identifying their implementation arrangements in educational purposes, - opening to our partners the doors of our classes, observing and co-animating teaching times, - facilitating the exchange of true experiences, and drawing up an inventory of the efficient teaching practices, - having a comparative look on the methods of dealing with learners in the partner countries in order to collectively build concrete recommendations regarding our professional, tutorial, teaching and organizational practices, with the aim of helping to provide a beneficial learning path for detained persons, along with a view to their social integration. What is expected to come out of this work will be materialized through the writing, experimentation, dissemination and exploitation of two tools: - a catalog of good practice compiling sessions and educational sequences that can be immediately reused in the teaching process used in detention, - an educational kit for the attainment of training schemes in a prison indicating the various stages of individualized training of detainees by teachers and educational teams, thus issuing recommendations in order to best position the student as a protagonist in charge for his/her own curriculum. We remain convinced that the mutual enrichment of daily practice in the classroom, the dissemination, sharing and sustainability of the innovative results of this project will hopefully be the decisive impact in terms of optimized management of the detainees' continuous training, a key element in one's reintegration. Our common working program will become by all means the basis of many even larger educational and organizational expectations. It will then constitute the crucible of their future collective pursuit, for the benefit of detained persons, via a subsequent and ambitious innovative project that will hopefully become enlarged to other partners, in the framework provided by our European Union.
In order to benefit from a hindsight on our practices, to question our methods of care, our tools for involving detainees in their schooling and securing their learning pathways, we wanted to exchange views on all these points with our European counterparts. Our objectives were therefore as follows: 1/ To facilitate the exchange of experiences between educational operators facing similar challenges in different countries; 2/ To make an inventory of the existing mechanisms for implementing education in prisons in the different participating countries; 3/ To carry out an inventory of current teaching practices and to formalise, together, a resource document (a catalogue of good teaching practices); 4/ To cross-reference the ways in which learners are cared for between partner countries and to issue collective recommendations by jointly exploring other organizational perspectives; 5/ To create a concrete tool whose beneficiary will be the learner in order to improve his or her school involvement and, ultimately, his or her ability to reintegrate.
The right to lifelong education and training and the principle of equal opportunities are the basis of our ambition to enable prisoners to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to reintegrate into society as effectively as possible. The teaching structures working in prisons participate de facto in this social integration. Faced with a teaching context heavily impacted by a very strong discontinuity in the individual pathways of learners resulting from multiple factors (high turnover of people, great heterogeneity of the public, numerous constraints inherent in the security requirements of places of detention), we, professionals in charge of teaching in prisons, must contribute to a reflection, or even a restructuring of the learning pathways, constantly updating our knowledge as well as our teaching practices. We therefore chose an Erasmus+ project for the exchange of good practices with European partners who share the same daily life and with whom we could build common tools that could be adapted to each site.