Hello Rebecca. Thank you so much for taking the time to look at our initiative. I'm aware of the amazing work that TWB does. We'd absolutely love to have a conversation with you about working together to see how we can support more educational projects in more countries. One of the things we would like to do with the support from the IDEO community is to translate our training into local languages and mother tongue languages so that each country can offer Crisis Classroom training for local volunteer / refugee educators in their own context using volunteers with local expertise. I'm a newbie to the IDEO platform. How do we take the next step? Kindest regards, Kate.

Hi Waliullah
This is a fantastic piece of kit! We're developing mobile classrooms and teacher resources in backpacks for Crisis Classroom. Would be great to talk about how we might collaborate.
Darren@crisisclassroom.com

Hi Christel
Thanks for your message! I'll do my best to reply.
1) How long is a pop up school able to sustain itself? We don't know as we have only just started trialling our prototype, but the structure itself has a shelf life of about 10 years and is easily repaired if something is damaged.
2) Community buy-in? We are currently working through local partners who have strong connections in the community. Our model is to train locals but to augment their work with trained volunteers from other locations. Once you've trained with Crisis Classroom you can volunteer in any partner project, so there is the potential of fresh expertise from around the world coming in to any local area. Classes are open to anyone, so we would expect to see locals taking advantage of these opportunities too. This model also ensures that the local economy benefits from volunteers staying in local guest houses, eating in local restaurants, etc
3) Are the lessons government approved? Not at the moment. We are not teaching an academic curriculum, but rather through skills based activities. We are looking at ways of evaluating the efficacy of our lessons and of gaining university certification for our training, but the point of our lessons is to build relationships and support pathways into further education and employment, so we are not trying to replace formal government sanctioned courses. The misunderstanding is that we are building a set curriculum of activities, and this is not the case.
4) Are we equipped to work in conflict zones? Not specifically. Our model has been built in European camps and other environments where refugees and migrants are settling, so the context of our work has been in stable countries. But this does not mean the model could not be adapted for conflict zones. The principles of the way we teach would be the same... it would be up to the individual educators to decide where they do that. We would need to know more about the safety implications of entering zones of conflict to be able to design for this situation. Our lessons are not dependent on the pop-up classroom - our basic unit of education is a teacher with a backpack, so wherever a trained teacher can go, Crisis Classroom can follow.
I hope that helps. Please let me know if I can be more helpful.
Darren (co-founder Crisis Classroom)