Awareness vs Intentionality: Exploring Education for Sustainable Development in a British Hindu Community

Abstract

This aims of this community education initiative is to foster sustainability consciousness and behavioural change in the UK's minority Hindu community and determine how awareness affects behavioural intentions. This report compares the effectiveness of an educational experience designed for the congregation at the Janmashtami Festival organized at Bhaktivedanta Manor Temple with its effectiveness at two external events. The experience involves a series of exhibits that link environmental themes with spiritual lifestyle choices through an Ecological Footprint questionnaire, a consultation session, and a pledge tree where respondents vow to make one lifestyle change. Despite the differences in religious context and audience demographic, results are similar. Participants recognized a wide range of lifestyle‐related sustainability issues but were persuaded to pledge changes that were small, easily achieved and tightly specified. They avoided issues that involved major impacts on their lives and were most positive to changes considered to be aligned with the majority values of their community. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Communicating Sustainability within Britain’s Hindu Community

“…The campaign uses a tented, interactive exhibition, originally developed for the Janmashtami celebrations in Watford, UK, to link pro-sustainability behaviour with scriptural texts and the concept of karma. Making a pro-sustainability lifestyle change is advocated as a devotional act, which may be reinforced by making a formal pledge to God [17,30]. Survey results show the approach's limits and indicate that participants are open to new ideas but tend to pledge to do better those small things already done well rather than make major lifestyle changes.…”

“…Examining two sample UK-based community education events highlights both the problems and potentials for promoting pro-sustainability causes within the Hindu community. The consciousness-raising -Karma to Climate Change‖ (K2CC) campaign encourages participants to make pro-sustainability lifestyle changes as a religious vow [17,30]. It also illustrated both the need to promote -green energy‖ provision within the community and highlights the patterns of behaviour that it is unwilling to change, such as long-haul travel for family and pilgrimage purposes (Figure 1).…”

“…Subsequently, more compact versions of the exhibition were used at three other festivals and at two Annual Conferences of the National Hindu Students Forum. The original K2CC design and pedagogy, as well as its smallest, -desk-top‖, version have already been described by Chauhan and colleagues [17,30]. This paper describes Sheila Chauhan's design for the second full-scale iteration at the Janmashtami Festival of 2008.…”

How Children Come to Understand Sustainable Development: A Contribution to Educational Agenda

“…The final, and perhaps the most important question is therefore how to implement the findings of the current study into practice; education is probably the key term in meeting this goal. Considerable attempts have already been made to reveal the effects of different educational approaches on the formation of sustainability‐related attitudes, behaviour or products (Hailey, ; Leerberg et al , ; Chauhan et al , ; Springett and Kearins, ). As some authors noted, education for sustainable development is not only about forming attitudes, behaviour or products.…”

“…The decade since 2000 witnessed an outbreak of literature on sustainable development, referring the concept of sustainability to wide areas of human experience such as climate change, air and water pollution, overconsumption, overpopulation, or public‐space planning, in both natural and social sciences (Hopwood et al , ; Koizumi, ; Oskamp, ; Schmuck and Vlek, ; Winter, ). Environmental issues began to be thoroughly considered alongside different aspects, including ethical, economic, legal, political, technical, social and educational (Alabaster and Hawthorne, ; Chauhan et al , ; Hopwood et al , ; Hull, ; Leerberg et al , ; Pawłowski, ; Strannegard and Dobers, ). In addition, the importance of sustainable development issues was being increasingly acknowledged not only in journals dedicated to environmental issues but also in publications from other fields.…”