Situating Moral Education in a Globalized World: Environmental Ethical Values and Student Experiences

Since the 1980s the United Nations has called for a sustainable development, responding to the challenges of ecological crisis, global warming, and continuous social inequity. Within the sustainable development agenda environmental ethical values are addressed, formulated as concerns for human beings in the present and the future, and for the more-than-human world. These values are also central in UNESCO’s initiative of education for sustainable development. This chapter is an empirical study based on observations of a class of tenth grade Norwegian students who are exposed to the challenge of sustainable development in moral education. I examine how the environmental ethical values formulated by UNESCO are recontextualized in the classroom. The analyses are informed by critical cosmopolitanism, with a sensitivity for the situatedness of the students in a web of relations. In the particular lesson in which sustainability is addressed, carbon footprint plays a significant role, drawing attention to the students’ consumption patterns. In this way the issue becomes individualized and depoliticized, reflecting central tenets in neoliberalism. National concerns seem to add to this impact of hegemony. Informed by a retrospect group interview, the article demonstrates the potential of bringing in the students’ web of relations in moral education, addressing both their global and local embeddedness. An educational practice is suggested, in which the environmental ethical values are disclosed and explored, involving the students’ situatedness, and mediating between the ethical and the political

Clathrin-independent endocytosis: New insights into caveolae and non-caveolar lipid raft carriers

A number of recent studies have provided new insights into the complexity of the endocytic pathways originating at the plasma membrane of mammalian cells. Many of the molecules involved in clathrin coated pit internalization are now well understood but other pathways are less well defined. Caveolae appear to represent a low capacity but highly regulated pathway in a restricted set of tissues in vivo. A third pathway, which is both clathrin- and caveolae-independent, may constitute a specialized high capacity endocytic pathway for lipids and fluid. The relationship of this pathway, if any, to macropinocytosis or to the endocytic pathways of lower eukaryotes remains an interesting open question. Our understanding of the regulatory mechanisms and molecular components involved in this pathway are at a relatively primitive stage. In this review, we will consider some of the characteristics of different endocytic pathways in high and lower eukaryotes and consider some of the common themes in endocytosis. One theme which becomes apparent from comparison of these pathways is that apparently different pathways can share common molecular machinery and that pathways considered to be distinct actually represent similar basic pathways to which additional levels of regulatory complexity have been added. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved