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News of John Goodban’s passing reached me just prior to Christmas. He was a landmark character, forever associated in my mind with the IB.
I first met John at a regional Asia Pacific Language B workshop in 1990. In that meeting John’s unique energy and zeal for the values and ideals of the IB were immediately obvious.
I enjoyed listening to his tales of school authorisation visits, his visionary plans for expanding the IB into his area of administration and especially in China and India, and how he was managing to balance teaching and administrative duties in those early, extremely busy days of the IB Asia Pacific office.
At the time he was still the IB part-time regional representative for South East Asia, including Australasia but he was working from the UWC in Singapore. He became the full-time regional director in 1991.
He regretted that his regional duties were the cause of more frequent and more prolonged absences from his Geography classes at UWC. These duties were taking a toll. He smiled as he explained that when he did actually walk into his own classroom many of his students assumed that he was their substitute teacher.
We continued to meet in similar regional workshops during the next 10 years however it was when I was appointed CAS Coordinator at JIS in 1991 that I became much more truly cognizant of John’s unstinting support and passion for CAS.
At that time John was now full-time regional director for the Asia-Pacific region. Still based in Singapore he had also been appointed to chair the IBO CAS (Creativity, Action and Service) committee from 1990 to 1997.
Throughout that decade and into the next, John monitored, mentored, and counselled me in all “things” CAS. I treasured his wisdom and that advice. The attached pdf’s of his correspondence with me are indicative of his role therein.
In this second attachment, a copy of John’s CAS workshop report in 1989, I invite you to skim, scan, read and review the contents.
Twenty seven years on and it’s still relevant.
Indeed it’s quite remarkable how prescient and applicable are the recommendations from that group of professionals to CAS in 2016.
John’s CAS legacy shall rightly live on.
