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I received sad news today from Frances Slater, via GA President Fiona Sheriff about the sad passing of Norman Graves at the end of September. Frances' book 'Learning through Geography' sits in the bookshelf by my desk alongside Norman's classic 'Curriculum Planning in Geography'.
Norman was GA President in 1978. His entry on my GA Presidents is on the link here.
Image: Norman speaking at an IGU event in Leningrad in 1976 - image supplied by Norman.
The entry on the blog outlines his tremendous work in curriculum thinking. In a GeReCo piece by John Morgan, he says that at the time of his work at the Institute of Education Norman, David Hall and Bill Marsden:"were attempting to make sense for teachers of the convergence of curriculum theory and geographical theory. Geography was going undergoing its conceptual revolution and education was being reshaped by new findings from educational psychology and the introduction of rational curriculum planning. Graves summarised the challenges for geography teachers, who must make sense of the philosophical basis of their teaching and consider psychological questions of how young people learn. He noted that there were sociological questions of why some children learned faster and more effectively, but this was not his prime concern (even though it was of growing interest to others and spawned the birth of the ‘new sociology of education’ (Young 1971) also at the Institute of Education (IoE)."
Norman was very much involved with the work of the IGU as well as supporting the work of the GA.
A full appreciation of his work will appear in a future GA journal (and no doubt elsewhere) and I will collate these onto Norman's blog entry.
To finish, here's Norman with family and friends celebrating his 100th birthday in January of this year.
Image provided by Helene Scott with thanks, and with whom copyright resides.
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