Miguel Martín Alonso I Almería, (EFE) interns are formed thanks to a varied offer and summer courses.
This same week the ‘El Acebuche’ prison in Almería has hosted the summer course ‘The images that deceive us: art, visual culture and advertising as tools of social persuasion’, organized by the UNED, directed by Professor Gabriela Topa and coordinated by Professor Ángel Pazos.
The director of the Almeria prison, Miguel Ángel de la Cruz, explains to EFE that one of the most important tasks of penal institutions is to “facilitate personal development opportunities” for inmates, and stresses that education is the best “platform” for them to learn to “approach the free world”.
Therefore, to “conventional education” such as Primary or Secondary, different degrees are offered through the UNED. “There comes a time when teaching activity is reduced in summer and for that we have a very valuable alternative, which are these summer courses,” says De la Cruz.
leave stigma behind
Courses like this one that “addresses a sphere of perception that all citizens have a bit hidden”, although for him the most valuable thing is that the inmates see their “perception of leadership” increased. “A penitentiary center must also have a function of opening to the outside and have the perception that it is part of the social collective,” he emphasizes.
Professor Ángel Pazos -from UNED and the Complutense de Madrid- believes, for his part, that activities like this “return to university professors much more” than what this can offer. “It feels like the university is in a bubble, but the effect of bringing a professor here is an emotional payback,” he says.
Something that allows the teacher to leave behind “stigmas, prejudices and preconceived ideas”, highlighted Pazos, who has elaborated that “when one goes out, one is left amazed, happy and with an echo, in many cases, superior to the one they have with the students of the university themselves.
Ana María Cuesta, one of the professors of this summer course and researcher at the Complutense de Madrid, agrees with him, and insists on this idea: “We always say that the university is a bubble. Very pretty, but a bubble. In the end, when you work with other collectives, with another in other places, that bubble is like it explodes”.
“You realize that you are in your ecosystem, but that there is life far beyond. It always fills us with great satisfaction to get to another place and suddenly realize that what you do at your university, what you do research, what you do in your office, suddenly interests someone other than you, that it has a real projection. ”, he highlighted.
the summer course
Pazos explains that UNED has been “practically from the beginning” collaborating with Penitentiary Institutions with an “intense program of cultural and training activities” and, in fact, it is the university that examines penitentiary centers, but it has also been taking its courses for years summer to prisons.
In the case of the ‘El Acebuche’ course, in which people from the free world have also been able to participate, he points out that one of the objectives is to bring attendees closer to the emotional world, and on the other hand to give them an approach to visual culture and artistic.
It is also intended that they become aware of “this deception to which we are sometimes subjected with images through advertising, television, even through the media, and train ourselves to detect possible deceptions, possible subliminal intentions”, he adds.
Professor Cuesta points out that in her case she takes them to “the world of color, of symbolism”, something that she hopes will serve to “open their eyes, especially in the world of art”.
“We all have emotions, we all connect in some way and so do they. That is the part that I want them to see, that we can all understand art in a close way and that they, even when they are here, can do it and can understand it in their own way, just as valid as that of a university professor or professor” , he concludes. EFE