Curriculum Development Under Multicultural Background

Nowadays, the development of multi-culture is informational and global, it is being researched and interchanged unprecedentedly as well as. Embodied in the trend of education reform, it is an important topic to cultivate people with multicultural consciousness in every country's education. School education must supply students with cultural experience, raise their artistic appreciation, arouse their strong pride and self-esteem through their native culture, then understand and respect other cultures, at last extend the understanding and respect to other countries. But for a long time, the discussion and practice about multi-culture and multicultural education was mainly under the background of nationalities or ethics in a single country. Now it is time to discuss it in an opener way.Education has the function to choose, pass on, preserve, transform and create culture, as well as the function to integrate the contradictories and conflicts between different cultures. The development of multi-culture has brought important influence to education, it renewed the thinking fashion of education, accelerated the process of education democracy, advanced the diversity of education modes, and it also pushed on the reformation of education continuously, from regional to global, from a few people to all. The influence that multi-culture brought to education gives us such a notice: the educator must realize the multicultural backgrounds of the educated all the time and make it a base for curriculum construction.Curriculum is a kind of choice to culture and also a way of culture construction. Under the backdrop of multi-culture, curriculum culture should also be diversified, the culture in curriculum is not only a single nation's, but include the cream of world culture. There are two core factors must be considered to construct any kind of curriculum: one is the nature of knowledge, the other is the principle of justice. The challenge that multi-culture brought to knowledge make curriculum must consider the problem following knowledge, there are views of curriculum knowledge, curriculum function, curriculum type and curriculum objective. That is to say, what kind of knowledge students should master, and how to master. The principle of justice is the core view of multi-culture, it reflects in curriculum is how to give the students the biggest fair, that is the problem of concept of value of curriculum. Divergence anddiversity is the basis of curriculum under multi-culture. According to it, curriculum value should be the value of education pluralism. Dialogue and communication is the way to realize the value of education pluralism.The settlement of concept of knowledge and value problem is the basis of setting up curriculum objective, choosing curriculum contents, and the way of carrying out curriculum under multicultural backgrounds. On curriculum objectives, we should make student obtain multicultural knowledge, establish the concept of multi-culture, cultivate multicultural consciousness, achieve the understanding and respect to inter-culture, develop critic thinking, make a reflexive thinking to his native culture, and raise their multicultural association ability by practice. On contents of curriculum, it should involve the following fields: knowledge, ability, attitude and value, make it a basic norm that students can exist and develop in a multicultural society. On curriculum carrying out, it should show the following four trends: set free the curriculum power, integrate the curriculum contents, cooperate and inquiry teaching, and the use of modern information technique.