IGU - CGE

The IGU (International Geographical Union) will have their 100th conference next year in Paris.

This year's IGU-CGE conference was held last week in Prague.

The keynote speakers and several of the other sessions involved people who I have been privileged to work with over the years on ERASMUS+ funded projects including Michael Solem and the third phase of GeoCapabilities is well represented too.

On the IGU site, there is history of the IGU, which was originally co-written by Norman Graves, former GA President and added to by other people. (Downloadable as PDF or Word document)

He talks about the original seminars organised with the UN, which included Neville Scarfe from the UCL IoE.

In 1950, UNESCO organized their first seminar on the teaching of geography in Montreal. This seminar was chaired by Neville Scarfe (1908-1985), who at that time was Head of the Geography Department at the University of London Institute of Education. The result of this seminar was UNESCO’s A Handbook of Suggestions on the Teaching of Geography (Unesco, 1951) mainly drafted by Neville Scarfe.

Following the book, the next stages of the development drew in L Dudley Stamp. This followed the early UK Land User Survey which has appeared on the blog before.

Neville Scarfe reported his association with L. Dudley Stamp, a British geographer at the London School of Economics. Scarfe, a British geography teacher, became senior lecturer at the London Institute of Education in 1935. He was a professional acquaintance of Stamp’s since the London geographers were, in Scarfe’s words, a friendly and sociable group. Both were members of the Royal Geographical Society, which was a further reason for contact. It is likely that Stamp and Scarfe collaborated during the 1930s and 1940s when Stamp organized the school children of the United Kingdom to map the land use near their schools. Scarfe had a network of many geography teachers and students who participated in the mapping. Stamp and Scarfe both participated in the first post war IGU conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 1949, where geographical education and international cooperation were topics being addressed with considerable interest. It was during the Lisbon Congress that the IGU appointed a Committee on the Teaching of Geography under the chairmanship of Neville Scarfe.

The history also talks about the publication of the 1965 UNESCO New Source Book for Geography Teaching.

This can be borrowed from the Internet Archive website.

It features several chapters by Norman Graves on the teaching of geography which make interesting reading, and also a chapter by Tom W Brown who was a teacher at the King's School, Gloucester on the organisation of the geography classroom.