Math is the queen of sciences. Probably everyone has heard this slogan. But probably no one has ever heard that the queen went behind the bars…
And this is what happened in Plock penitentiary. More specifically, a body responsible for this deed is Busola Socially Excluded Education Association, which quite regularly tries to organize additional educational activities for inmates serving their time in Plock prison.
One of these undertakings was an educational project titled “Math in prison” which was implemented in cooperation with The Faculty of Applied Sciences of the Utrecht University (Stichting Hogeschool Utrecht) within Erasmus+ programme (KA2 Small-Scale Partnership Project). The faculty of the Dutch university is very active in the field of promoting mathematical education, especially among people who have major deficits in this area.
The main motivation to participate in the project was the desire to help excluded social groups – in our case prisoners – and the desire to promote numeracy education among adults whose educational opportunities are severely limited. The main objective of the project was to prepare materials which could be used to minimize deficits in the mathematical education of these prisoners who show significant deficiencies in this area. What is more, the target group of our activities were prisoners from a therapeutic unit where inmates with non-psychotic mental disorders and mild mental retardation stay. All the more so, the project seemed to be quite a challenge.
As mentioned above, the main element of the project was to create materials to teach/learn mathematics at the very basic level. The materials were prepared after a training in which Polish prison educators took part. The training took place at the project partner’s seat. The training was conducted by specialists from the University of Utrecht who, on a daily basis, deal with people with low abilities in learning mathematics. As a long-term effect, we expect that the possibility of acquiring mathematical skills by this particular group will contribute to their social rehabilitation and improve their social opportunities after they have been released from prison.
The publication we created consists of 15 thematic units and a competency test that should be performed before starting the course (to determine what level the students are at) and after its completion (to check whether the students have acquired any new skills). All thematic units directly or indirectly relate to the ability of using mathematical knowledge and they are based on examples from everyday life. These teaching/learning materials also include short videos and presentations for teachers to use. The educational materials have been prepared in such a way that they can be used during a class not necessarily by a math teacher. In addition, this publication can be used completely in a non-school environment as materials for self-study.
The author of the Polish version is Mr. Konrad Byttner, a math teacher with many years of experience in working with socially excluded people who have deep deficits in the field of mathematical education. Currently, he also works at the Center for Continuing Education at the prison in Płock. The materials were created on the basis of the website https://ff-rekenen.nl and with the consent of the authors of the website (where you can find these resources for teaching / learning mathematics), Mr. Kees Hoogland and Ruben IJzerman.
The second stage of the project was to use the created materials in practice. In the aforementioned therapeutic ward for people with non-psychotic mental disorders, we managed to organize a group of 14 volunteers-students who attended a math course for 3.5 months. Once a week, during meetings with an educator, the prisoners learned basics of math, and in the meantime they improved their skills within this field. One could notice that their commitment and willingness to broaden their knowledge was evident.
Thanks to the level pre-test (which was carried out before the first class) and the final test (which was carried out after the last class), it turned out that most of the participants increased their mathematical competences and skills during the classes! We believe that it was worth sacrificing our time even for such a small group of prisoners. We hope that learning process will not go in vain, and perhaps some participants of the project will want to increase their math skills even more and hopefully will become closer friends with the “queen”.
Hubert Skrzynski
