Ideas... the source of solutions.

"She's an ideas person... ask her." Teachers are often gifted with this capability. It's part of the tool kit that we get out and sharpen to use on a daily basis.

Some days though, when we are pushed to find a solution to a very important problem, we can become immobilised and feel very alone. It seems as though it's all up to you to come up with a plan that will be affordable, manageable and successful. That conundrum can have you blundering around in the liminal space, looking for answers from your own experience, books you've read, thin air even!

The beauty of having access to a PLN means that you can ask for help. You can reach out and access the expertise of others and bring solutions into your own context. Your appropriation of those ideas is a kind of cooperation. A sort of collaboration of minds within the greater education community.

In being tasked to design a new future learning space for teachers and children in regions of crisis around the world I have found myself deep in the land of "I have no idea how I could help."

I think it has sent me back to a period of time in my teaching career where I was working in a remote school for Aboriginal secondary students in the Northern Territory. I had been a teacher for quite a long time at this stage and I felt that I had the capacity to help. You might say it was a strong desire to make a contibution, knowing I had skills that were valuable. You could even say I was verging on being a... I hesitate to admit this... do-gooder.

The harsh reality hit me like a slap in the face. Actually, that was literally pretty close to what happened. I felt totally useless to improve or contribute positively to the long term solution to any of the problems faced by my incredible, complex, students. I would lie awake most nights, with my heart literally racing, trying to think of ways to do better, be better, help better.

I knew the reality of their futures was going to be very different to the idealistic, glitter and fairy-dust ones I had cooked up for them in my privileged imagination. Oh, how my Pollyanna heart broke and came smashing down to the floor amid tales of substance abuse, paralysing family enmeshment, short-lived lives and abandonment.

I realised fairly soon on that I had one job to do. Be there. Be myself. Be a good teacher. Keep turning up every day. I couldn't save them. I couldn't even hope to change the direction of their paths.

But I could be with them and walk with them. I could let them see my life, my marriage, my parenting. I could show them options and increase their opportunities. I could open doors with them and walk through with them and let them choose to go on. I could help them build life tools like reading and numeracy, ways to speak for different circumstances. I could pray with them.

So, for me, in designing a future learning space for children in crisis zones, refugee camps, disaster areas, I approach it with less of the do-gooder Pollyanna and more of the realist.

I have been amazed that every idea I have thought of so far has already been done, and done incredibly well. For example; I thought I had come up with the idea for a School In A Box: a case full of essential equipment to start a classroom in an emergency situation. It would be sent in with Aid agencies as part of the first response, along with medical and nutritional requirements. Lo and behold I discover that the wonderful people at UNICEF have been distributing School In A Box for 20 years!

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Similarly, I had an idea that teachers in refugee camps could connect and support each other using mobile phone apps to message and share resources. Already happening in Kenya- using Whats App. Brilliant!

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I even pushed my imagination to think of an invention that could be carried in to any disaster and set up an instant mobile phone/wifi network to connect people to assitance and support. Bingo! Vodaphone has backpack network systems already going out all over the world to assist during natural disasters and other crises. So many other amazing companies have met this need too.

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Even though I felt slightly crest-fallen that I wasn't the first genius to think of these plans, I celebrated each time I saw evidence of ideas in action. People doing their bit to connect and support teachers and students doing the hard job of education in a crisis zone.

Once again I am faced with the dilema - What can I do? Some of those old panicky emotions rise to the surface as I explore this latest assignment task. My ideas seem silly. They've already been done. What can I possibly contribute to a problem that is not solvable?

I'm guessing that I will arrive at a similar conclusion to what I discovered in the NT. Walk with people who need you. Be there, somehow. Show up and do what you can do. It matters that you are there, walking with them.