PROGRAMME
Hotel Royal Manotel, Geneva, Switzerland
Annual General Meeting and Peterson Lecture GENEVA 2011 Saturday, 9 April
Annual General Meeting Agenda 14.30 Opening session
Carol Bellamy, Chair
14.35 Reports • Chair
Carol Bellamy
• Director general
Jeffrey Beard, DG
Katy Ricks, Secretary
Ken Vedra, Treasurer
• Presentation of accounts for 1 January to 31 December 2010
Ken Vedra / Daniel Benham, Chief Financial Officer
• Auditors’ report
KPMG
• Appointment of auditors
Ken Vedra
15.00 Board elections
15.05 Financial matters • Financial report
15.25 Any other business
Carol Bellamy
15.30 End of meeting
“ Rational, imaginative, with fantastic persistence. He was a good speaker and writer who made an enormous contribution.” Sutcliffe 1992
Peterson Lecture Education and the Knowledge Economy 15.45 - 17.00 Francis Gurry Mr Francis Gurry was appointed Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on October 1, 2008, and Secretary-General of its sister organization, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), on October 30, 2008. Francis Gurry began his WIPO career in 1985. He was instrumental in establishing the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center in 1994 and subsequently in developing the highly successful Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. He served on the WIPO senior management team from 1997, initially as Assistant Director General, then from 2003 as Deputy Director General. Before joining WIPO, Francis Gurry practiced as an attorney in Australia, and taught law at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He holds law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne, an Honorary Professor of Peking University and holds honorary doctorates from a number of universities. He is the author of numerous publications and articles on intellectual property issues in international journals. An Australian national, Francis Gurry speaks fluent English and French.
“ Peterson was very impressive. He had a major role in developing the philosophical underpinnings of the IB. He was the outstanding international education figure.” Gellar 1991
Alec Peterson The Peterson lectures were inaugurated in 1989 to commemorate the commitment of Alec Peterson to the International Baccalaureate (IB) as its first director general from 1966–77. From the start, he had been attracted to the “IB project” developed by teachers at the International School of Geneva in the early 1960s. This project encompassed so much of Alec’s own desire for a broad-based education favouring critical-thinking skills, community service and an international perspective. Of Scottish origin, Alec read Classical Studies at Oxford and quickly gained a reputation in Britain as an educator who wanted to reform the A-level system. His work with Mountbatten in Malaysia during World War II gave him a zest for promoting world peace and in-roads into diplomatic and political circles on an international scale. Alec was director of the Department of Educational Studies, Oxford from 1958 to 1973 and he was for many years (until 1977) chairman of the editorial board of the prestigious periodical Comparative Education. A highly respected and broadly travelled educator, he had the international and
academic stature to promote the IB Diploma Programme around the world while at the same time being both grounded and a charismatic visionary, a rare combination. He played a particular role in shaping the theory of knowledge course, then at the core of the IB Diploma Programme and now influencing all aspects of the curriculum, from the primary years through the middle years to the Diploma Programme. His students admired him. He was bright, caring, civilized and very persistent. In 1987, a year before his death, Peterson published Schools Across Frontiers, his account of the creation of the United World Colleges and the International Baccalaureate, and his final tribute to these two organizations whose history was so intertwined with his own. When he died in 1988, Alec Peterson had supported the IB for a quarter of a century as an educator, an internationalist and a pacifist.
“ Alec Peterson was a visionary with charisma. He had the necessary academic standing to make the IB credible. He was very competent and convincing in public.” Ritchie 1992