Celebrating AAEE’s first president: Peter James Fensham AO

Abstract

With great sadness, we acknowledge the death of Emeritus Professor Peter Fensham AO, the first President (1980)(1981)(1982) of the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE). Peter died in Melbourne on 23 August 2021, aged 93 years. We mourn his passing while celebrating his contributions to environmental education in Australia, and internationally.Although well known within the environmental education community in Australia and internationally from the mid 1970s through to the 1990s, Peter was better known as a science educator (Cross, 2003a(Cross, , 2003bGunstone, 2009). His undergraduate degree from The University of Melbourne was in science and his first PhD was in chemistry at the University of Bristol. He completed a second PhD in social psychology at the University of Cambridge before returning to Australia in 1955 to teach chemistry at the University of Melbourne. He was appointed as the first Professor of Science Education at Monash University in 1967. This was a controversial appointment as he had neither school teaching experience nor a postgraduate qualification in education. But his two PhDs had given him insight into two different worlds. As a result, he believed that science was not only a subject matter but also a tool for social change, and he argued for access to science for all students as opposed to a select minority of future scientists, in the hope that they would use it as a force for good in the wider worldthat is, Science for All (Fensham, 1985).That Peter came from science into environmental education was typical for the times. As I found in my investigation of the 'founders of environmental education' (Greenall Gough, 1993), those 'founders' who were advocating for environmental education in the 1960s and 1970s all had a university-level science background, and some did not have an education background. Indeed, at this time, science was seen as the natural 'home' for environmental education (although many geographers dispute this). Peter acknowledged this association himself in a reflection piece on AAEE's first 35 years: in 1974 I, as the only science background person on the [Australian] UNESCO Committee (an indication of how the environment was then seen), was asked to convene a group (UNESCO Committee/CDC) to begin to plan a national meeting on Education and the Human Environment for later in 1975. (Fensham, 2015, p. 3).

On Peter Fensham

“…As Gough (2022) has reminded us, Peter considered that 'we were not to see ourselves as apart from but integrally part of the Australian environment(s)' and 'action and learning were seen as being symbiotic aspects of environmental education in all its stages' (Fensham, 1987, p. 22). Having a positive future vision and working towards its manifestation through personal action and the encouragement of others were fundamental to Peter's conception of environmental education.…”