Musical education in the prison

Abstract

This article aims to report proposals and activities accomplished during an internship under the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná’s (PUC-PR) Bachelor’s degree in Music in the nursery department of the Paraná’s State Penitentiary for women, between August and September 2013. A proposal for music education formulated during the program envisaged forty incarcerated mothers and their children, forty infants with an age ranging from zero to three years old born in prison grounds. The placement of interns in the said condition was possible due to the Science and Transcendence program, created by an agreement with PUC-PR and the Secretary of Law, Citizenship and Human rights (SEJU) in 2012. The interns team were formed by four students and an educator participating as a field supervisor, who had experience with the subject group as she works on business days at the nursery. At the university, alongside the professor in charge of the internship, the group built weekly plans of classes to be teached at Thursdays for the children. Through music education, we decide to go for strategies that could incorporate parent, child and intern in order to help with the process of parallel communication and interaction where social isolation prevails. A repertoire of musics and activities to support a significant learning experience, able to explore the motherly emotional bonding was elected to nurture an harmonious interaction for the children. The idea was to foster the infants’ emotional, cognitive and psychomotor aspects of their growth by allowing them to listen and understand sounds based mainly on a graceful environment in contrast to the violence of a prison’s reality. We made use of education to make women think about the need of a self-taught composure on the specific circumstances. We verified that the lack of research on the field surrounding the topic, however, had countless possibilities of social insertion regarding mother and child relationship