Information about the project

Nowadays, many young people do not have any role models to follow. Lifestyle is very dynamic, many of them are lost in their lives, very often neglected which many a time, leads to them making wrong choices in their lives. This may have detrimental effects. Because of that BUSOLA Socially Excluded Education Association came up with a project titled “Voice from behind the bars”. The goal of the project is to organize preventive meetings for youth, which are led by prisoners serving their sentences in the Plock penitentiary unit. Inmates-lecturers are students of the Continuing Education Centre at the Plock penitentiary who got engaged in our project and agreed to take part in it. The goal of the meetings is to force participants to think over and reflect over their lives (either their own lives or the lives of someone close from their surroundings who have various life problems). These meetings are to have positive influence on the participants, mainly young people. Thanks to the fact that young people have a chance to get acquainted with negative life experiences of other people (in our case these are inmates serving their time in prison) they may consider the question of making right choices in their lives and the consequences of negative ones. This thesis was formed thanks to everyday observations, conversations with teachers, parents, etc. Moreover, young people in Płock do not have a chance to take part in such educational classes since never before there has been an attempt to provide youth with such a meeting.

Goals of the project

The main goal of the project is complementing educational offer of the schools where the meetings are going to be held by providing an innovative, and unparalleled in our city, offer of organizing educational classes for the young. Specific goals of the project are: making oneself to reflect over one’s own behaviour, getting acquainted with detrimental effects which can be the outcome of one’s wrong life choices, triggering emotions to make oneself to reflect over wrong life choices, shaping positive social and civil attitude, shaping an attitude of a responsible young man, encouraging and motivating to take responsibility for one’s own behaviour, prevention against inconsiderate behaviour and wrong choices which may have an influence on one’s further life.

Voice from behind the bars in every school

In the third edition of our project we created an educational film from the penitentiary unit. One of the most important parts of the film are testimonies of the prisoners who are telling how wrong choices led to negative changes in their lives. Almost half-an-hour long film is meant to self-use by teachers/school masters/psychologists or school pedagogues during educational classes. We wanted to make it possible for schools, where we cannot physically get with prisoners, to take part in our project so that they could listen to inmates. Our assumption was to prepare a ready-made educational cycle which consists of a ready idea for the lesson:

1. • three separate lesson sheets for students (which are one logical and consistent entirety)to be used during three consecutive lessons with young people,

   • teacher’s notes for the teacher leading the lesson cycle,

   • a script for the leading teacher which contains tips how the whole lesson should be used during the class.

The lesson is supplemented with the mentioned above film around which the whole idea is built. Below you can see the trailer of the film and screenshots of the lesson materials. We will happily share materials for free with any school which will contact us with a request to do so. Please send your requests to:

gloszzakrat@wp.pl