In the Shadow of a Fado: An Erasmus+ Journey Unlike Any Other
A prison recital near Porto revealed what educational mobility can teach us about trust, dignity and the time that remains after the classroom door closes.
Editorial photograph of Porto, not of the prison visit: Wurminister / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped to fit the hero.
The music began in a room inside a women’s prison near Porto. Poetry followed. Then a fado, accompanied by shadows projected across the space, brought an unexpected stillness to an afternoon shared by around 150 women. My colleague and I had travelled to Portugal to observe adult education. In that moment, we were learning something more difficult to put on a timetable.
Beyond the familiar Erasmus itinerary
This was the first job-shadowing mobility of our IPEP Jaén Erasmus+ project, focused on rethinking educational practice with adults, people learning in prison and young offenders. My travelling companion was Manuel Ortega, a Physics and Chemistry teacher. For six days, our hosts at Escola Secundária João Gonçalves Zarco in Matosinhos helped us look closely at how education reaches people whose circumstances rarely fit the standard school story.
At the Santa Cruz do Bispo women’s prison, the security arrangements reminded us where we were. Yet the recital asked us to look beyond the institution. Women recited, sang and danced before their peers. The fado with projected shadows held the room. It would be easy to turn that scene into a sentimental symbol of redemption; it was, more concretely, an occasion in which participants could create and share work on their own terms.
The previous day, José Marquez, the adult-education coordinator at our host school, had introduced us to the teachers working there. We had not planned to address a group, but when invited to speak, Manuel and I introduced our Erasmus+ project to roughly 25–30 women. We talked, in Portuguese as best we could, about Jaén, its olive oil and the educational questions that had brought us to Portugal. What could have been an awkward presentation became a conversation.
What stays with me is not a checklist of methods. It is the seriousness with which teachers and learners met one another.
What happens when the lesson ends?
We also visited a men’s prison and observed its educational work. There, one comment cut through the language of project plans: for some learners, the hardest moment was when class finished and they had to return to their cells. A lesson could create a space for concentration, exchange and possibility. Its ending made the limits of that space painfully clear.
Our hosts showed us ways of coordinating prison education with the wider adult-learning offer, including pathways for recognising skills. The details belong to the Portuguese setting; they cannot simply be copied into Jaén. But the visit gave us a sharper set of questions: how are learners’ previous experiences recognised? How do teachers build continuity? What practical support allows an opportunity to lead somewhere after the class ends?
What a mobility is for
Erasmus+ did not make us experts in another country’s prison system in a week. It did allow us to listen, compare and return with a more precise understanding of our own choices as educators. Job shadowing becomes valuable when the journey continues in staff conversations, teaching decisions and the questions we ask students back home.
- Where can learners make their voices visible through reading, writing, performance or dialogue?
- How do we build trust without lowering expectations?
- What can we change in our teaching so that progress survives beyond a single lesson or visit?
The image of that fado remains with me: the shadows on the wall, the voices in the room and the unmistakable fact of the prison outside it. A very different Erasmus+ experience did not offer an easy ending. It gave us a responsibility to keep learning from what we had seen.
This account is based on the author’s original report of the IPEP Jaén mobility. No identifiable photographs of people inside the prison are used here.
Video included in the original article. Playback is provided by YouTube.
Continue the Erasmus+ story
Four more reports and practical resources from this blog.
IPEP Jaén · A further chapter in the Erasmus+ journey →
Erasmus+ Ideas Lab · Green and digital VET →
When the Erasmus project is left on its own →
The T.R.I.P. Guide · An Erasmus+ survival kit for coordinators →
For the first two cards, the published page loads the image directly from each linked post when available. A contextual Porto image remains as a fallback.
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