Remembering Peter Fensham, a founder of Australian environmental education

Emeritus Professor Peter James Fensham AO (26 October 1927–23 August 2021), was a major figure in science education in Australia and internationally for many decades. However, fewer people are aware of the significant role he played in environmental education from the 1970s to the 1990s, both in Australia and internationally, and thus this is the focus of this remembrance of contributions in Environmental Education Research, offered by board member, Annette Gough, who worked with Peter across many decades.

Peter’s life as a science educator and his contributions to that field have been celebrated in a book (Cross 2003b) and in chapters and articles (e.g. Cross 2003a, 2003b; Gunstone 2009). Here I am remembering, and reflecting on, his contributions to environmental education¹.

Peter was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. He initially completed undergraduate and Master’s degrees in chemistry at the University of Melbourne, and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Bristol to undertake his PhD in the early 1950s. He met Christine in Bristol, and she was to become his wife and lifelong companion. After completing his PhD, he went to Princeton University in the United States of America as a postdoctoral student to study physical chemistry. There he encountered social psychology and was interested in studying it because, as he said when interviewed (Greenall Gough 1993), he felt he’d been immersed in science for a long time. However, he wanted to get back to England, because that was where Christine was. He returned on a Nuffield Foundation experimental scheme which encouraged people trained in the physical sciences to move into the social sciences, and completed a PhD in social psychology at Cambridge. His first job took him back into chemistry at the University of Melbourne, but he continued to develop his background in psychology through a few small studies in the psychology of learning chemistry. In 1967, this interest led to an invitation to take the Chair in Science Education in the, then, newly emerging Faculty of Education at Monash University, a position from which he retired at the end of 1992.

His academic standing led Peter to be an authoritative and powerful figure in science education and, through this, environmental education because, at that time, there was perceived to be a strong connection between the two. He was appointed to the Australian National Commission for UNESCO around 1973 and as convenor of their national seminar on “Education and the Human Environment” held in 1975 (Linke 1977). Regarding this seminar, he once commented, “I suppose because the environment was seen by many people as associated with science, I was the member of the Committee who got lumbered with being the organiser” (Fensham, interview transcript, 14 February 1992). Originally planned for May 1974, the seminar was postponed to May 1975 for a number of reasons, including a clash of interests and dates with another UNESCO seminar. He saw this seminar as pushing the boundaries of contemporary understandings of environmental education: “I think it was very important in setting controversial issues, education for the environment and decision making, and really tackling the more political aspects of including that as part of the agenda of environmental education” (Fensham, interview transcript, 14 February 1992).

Peter was invited to be the Australian delegate to the UNESCO–UNEP Environmental Education Program’s Belgrade Workshop on Environmental Education in October 1975 (Fensham 1976). This meeting was a very significant one in the development of his own philosophy of environmental education: he had organised the UNESCO seminar in Australia “as a sort of educational organisational task” and he “didn’t have any great philosophy of environmental education at that point in time, except my own quite substantial involvement in education and disadvantage in the human sphere … and taking that over to the biophysical environment” (Fensham, interview transcript, 14 February, 1992). He then went to the Belgrade meeting and (Fensham, interview transcript, 14 February 1992):

… that epitomised what we were trying to do with education for the environment because, even with the best will in the world, the liberals will find themselves confronted by groups who are much more radical than they are, and yet the liberals will always be in charge, because only liberals get put in charge of things.

Peter had moved into environmental education from several directions and through a number of coincidental happenings. He had been involved in setting up the Australian Science Education Project (ASEP) in the late sixties, which developed, as its main idea, what it called ‘the environment scheme’ (ASEP 1974, 91–93). As ASEP’s work neared completion, through the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), a group of people, including Peter, developed a proposal for a national environmental education program as a successor to ASEP. Although it was not funded, the proposal became a significant contribution to the development of an environmental education program by the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC). Peter was a member of the CDC Science Review Sub-Committee which considered and rejected the ACER proposal; it also administered the 1974/75 CDC Environmental Education Committee.

In 1976 he was appointed to chair the CDC Study Group on Environmental Education, for which I was the convenor. One of the project’s that emerged from the Study Group’s recommendations (CDC 1978) was the CDC Environmental Education Project (EEP 1978–1979). The EEP was a national project with liaison officers from each state and territory education department as part of its structure, and a strong network supported by a regular newsletter. At the final project meeting it was agreed that the network should be maintained as a national forum for environmental educators – and the Australian Association for Environmental Education was born. Based on the significant contributions he was making to environmental education at that time, Peter was elected as the first president of the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) (1980–82) (and in 1984 he was awarded a life fellowship of AAEE for his contributions to environmental education).

The curriculum materials development model adopted for this project married the CDC’s central role with encouraging developments at the local level. Based on Peter’s report of the Belgrade workshop (Fensham 1976), the Study Group argued for the development and dissemination of descriptive accounts of existing practices “in the language of how they happened – ‘teacher and student talk’” (CDC 1978, 18). In this context Peter was providing leadership towards the “leading edge” of curriculum innovation at the time, using case studies of practices rather than instrumentalist evaluations.

Peter headed the Australian delegation to the UNESCO–UNEP Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education held in Tbilisi, in the then USSR, in October 1977. Out of his participation emerged a report on the conference (Fensham 1978b) and a paper that is considered by many to be a landmark contribution reviewing “the nature of the ideas, programs and initiatives that now characterise environmental education, internationally and nationally” (Fensham 1978a, 446). He returned home in time to present a paper at a national conference on policies and strategies for the future in environmental education; his took problems for Australian environmental education as his focus, based on his experience at the international environmental education conferences. He presented the problems without solutions “because that would be contrary to the nature of environmental education” (Fensham 1977, 1) and indicated that he was reaching some different conclusions about the relationships between knowledge, mental and manual skills, attitudes and application (Fensham 1977, 9–10):

Usually with both formal and informal education there is an inbuilt assumption that this list also means the sequence for learning … there is some evidence that can encourage us to think of reversing the sequence and beginning with action, or at least breaking up the sequence and much more concurrently relating knowledge, skill and attitude learning to action programs in the environment of the school and in that wider community environment in which the school is set.

His thinking about environmental education continued to evolve. Reflecting back on his writing in 1987, he noted with respect to the characteristics of Australian environmental education as he saw them in 1977, “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 – a very different pedagogical view from that which prevails in much of substantial learning” (Fensham 1987, 22).

During the period when he was chairing the Victorian Environmental Education Council Peter wrote an influential article on the challenges facing environmental education as a separate subject in the senior secondary curriculum in Victoria. The arguments for abolishing it have had two main themes. Firstly, in the attempts “to hoist environmental education on its own petard… there is a weakness in a sectional and optional subject approach” (Fensham 1990, 18). Instead of Environmental Science/Studies being a separate subject, others have argued that the environment should be included as a dimension of other subject areas. Supporters of a separate subject have countered that, until the ideal of an environmental ethic over-arches “the whole curriculum and indeed the life and practice of the school and educational system… environmental subjects need to exist to exemplify what environmental education is” (Fensham 1990, 18). If this is the path chosen, then the challenge is to raise the level of acceptability of separate environmental subjects and bring them in from the margins. The second argument focused on the overlap of subject matter between Environmental Science and other subjects such as Geography and Biology and some of the other sciences. As Fensham (1990, 23) noted, “except for Psychology which at this point is very individually oriented”, Physics, Chemistry and Biology “quite explicitly refer both to the importance of the sciences for solving social and environmental problems and to the problems that the application of science in the form of various technologies have caused”. However, he observed, the focus in these subjects is on ‘education about the environment’ rather than ‘for the environment’, i.e. on facts and concepts rather than the values, cognitive tasks and social skills that characterise environmental education proper. These tussles around the place of environmental education as a separate subject in the curriculum have continued into the Australian Curriculum to this day, where the senior secondary subject “Earth and Environmental Science” is more geology than environmental science, and with a closer resemblance to the New South Wales HSC subject Earth and Environmental Science (NSW Education Standards Authority 2017) than to the Victorian VCE Environmental Science (VCAA 2015/2020).

Peter never saw himself as an environmental educator: “environmental education has always been, if you like, an extra for me, so that’s why my sort of contact with it is a bit uneven. I’m a science educator really … I’ve never been employed to do environmental education, so in a way it’s marginal and my attention to it goes in and out” (Fensham, interview transcript, 14 February 1992). However, he chaired the Victorian Environmental Education Council from its inception in 1989 to its demise in 1993, and he continued to be a spokesperson for environmental education in a wide range of forums.

Despite his disclaimer, Fensham is regarded by many Australians as being influential in the development of environmental education in Australia, and as being internationally influential by many too. Comments on my Facebook page, after I posted that Peter had died, reinforced this high regard:

“An EE elder and statesman. So respected internationally as well. Spent time with Peter both in Australia in the early 80s at the initial AAEE conferences and Moscow in 1987.” (Charles Hopkins, UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability at York University in Toronto Canada)

“One of the giants of the field” (Michael Reiss, University College London)

“The ripples of his influence have been consistent and significant” (Jennifer Pearson, current President of AAEE)

“A great man; someone who was so respected and admired. As Secretary of AAEE I worked closely with him in those first formative three years and witnessed his inspiring leadership firsthand. He was a wonderful first President.” (Jim Wilson, 1988-1990 AAEE President)

“Such a huge influence on Australian EE” (Jo-Anne Ferreira, University of Southern Queensland)

“Goodbye to lifelong advocate and contributor to environmental education nationally and globally” (Karen Malone, Swinburne University)

“We have lost one of our truly significant elders here. He attended the birth of international environmental education and made to it an enduring contribution” (Greg Hunt, Victoria)

“I have always had the utmost respect for Peter and his immeasurable contributions to EE, AAEE and the world in general” (Hilary Macleod, Queensland)

Although not so active in environmental education in recent years, he was a very welcome participant in the 2016 AAEE Conference in Adelaide, and his legacy will live on through those who studied and worked with him, and those who appreciated his brilliant mind, warmth and generosity. Vale, Peter, thank you for a great life’s work.

Peter is survived by his wife, Christine, his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. In these pandemic times a memorial service is yet to be organised.

Notes

1 Much of the following has its origins in my doctoral research which included an interview with Peter in 1992, some of which was published as Greenall Gough (1993).