COBRIG Meeting

As part of my Presidential journey I was asked to attend a meeting of COBRIG: the Council of British Geography.

This includes members from the following organisations - some educational and others from awarding bodies, inspectorates and government bodies. 

British Science Association (Geography group recorder) (BSA)
Conference of Heads of Geography in British Universities
Council for Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment, Northern Ireland (CCEA)
ESTYN
Geographical Association (GA)
Office of Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, England (OFSTED)
Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS with IBG)
Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS)
Scottish Association of Geography Teachers (SAGT)
Welsh Joint Education Committee/Cyd-bwyllgor Addysg Cymru (WJEC / CBAC)

COBRIG has been in existence since 1988.

It was created:

"to advance the interests of geography, and is made up of all the main organisations of geographers and geographical educationists in Britain."

Prominent among its initiatives in the educational context has been the recent COBRIG-inspired Geography into the Twenty-First Century (Rawling and Daugherty, (1996)), which has at its heart the central issue to which this article has been addressed: putting the  geography back into geographical education. This offers the basis of a fruitful agenda as represented, among other things, in Haggett’s delineation of ‘the central and cherished aspects of geographical education: a love of landscape and of field exploration, a fascination with place, a wish to solve the spatial conundrums posed by spatial configurations’ (Haggett, 1996, p. 17); in Johnston’s advocacy of a refreshed, dynamic, and distinctive place geography (pp. 73-4); and in Jackson’s concern for developing sensitivity to place connections at a variety of scales (p. 91); or, as Allen and Massey have put it: 

‘We live local versions of the world and in so doing we have to locate ourselves within a wider global context. We only understand the changes taking place in our own backyard when we begin to understand how changes taking place elsewhere affect our world’ (1995, p. 1)

Source: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/pluginfile.php/631169/mod_resource/content/1/geog_sk6_06t_5.pdf 

Neil Simmonds and Eleanor Rawling were originally involved from the GA's perspective, along with Richard Daugherty.

COBRIG previously ran seminars for geographers as well through the 1990s in particular.

This meeting was held at the Royal Geographical Society - the first time I'd been there for about three years and it was good to be back in such a historic location.

It was lovely to meet some old friends - particularly Erica Caldwell who was representing SAGT / RSGS, and also to make new acquaintances.

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license.