Remembering Brian Street and his Work with the International Baccalaureate (IB)

Abstract

I met Brian in July 1978 when I attended the very first workshop for teachers of International Baccalaureate (IB) Social Anthropology (later to become Social and Cultural Anthropology) at the University of Sussex in Brighton, where Brian was then teaching. I’m no longer sure what I was expecting in an IB “Chief Examiner†but having grown up in Oxford, I know I was generally skeptical of academics as knowing much about the ‘real world’ and worried that a Chief Examiner would not be interested in the dynamics of a high school classroom or the perspectives of 16- and 17-year-old students themselves. Nonetheless I was entirely excited to be there - I had loved my first two years of teaching IB Anthropology and was pretty sure that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life! I was very wrong about the Chief Examiner but right about myself. In this paper I remember Brian Street and his role in the International Baccaulaureate.