On Environment As Curriculum

Environment as Curriculum is a new type of curriculum brought up on the demand of talent development in the learning society. The integration of Environment as Curriculum, as a parallel with activity curriculum and subject curriculum, into the existing curriculum system is conducive to students' physical and mental development to the full. Proceeding from the nature of curriculum and the educational significance of environment, the concept of Environment as Curriculum is brought up in this paper. Environment as Curriculum is defined through distinction and comparison with subject curriculum, activity curriculum and hidden curriculum:Environment as Curriculum indicates the curriculum which aims to promote students' physical and mental development through the environment which is created, designed and developed consciously to guide students to engage in, perceive and comprehend the information contained in the environment. Except for the part of Introduction, this paper falls into three chapters:Chapter one deals with the theoretical foundations to propose the concept of Environment as Curriculum. Firstly, it discusses questions, including what curriculum is and what kind of things can be counted as curriculum. Through analysis of various typical curriculum definitions, the author finds that whatever arouses students' initiative to generalize experiences, or whatever can affect students' physical and mental development; then it analyzes the unique functions of cultivation, such as aesthetic education, orientation, stimulation, fitness, compulsory regulation, etc. Thus, the characteristics of Environment as Curriculum are drawn; finally, through review of existing curriculum concepts, it is discovered that some concepts of curriculum, such as latent curriculum, have considered environment as curriculum. These analyses of these three parts are taken as the bases for Environment as Curriculum.Chapter two establishes the concept of Environment as Curriculum. After introducing the rationale of Environment as Curriculum, Environment as Curriculum is delimited and then differentiated from hidden curriculum, subject curriculum and activity curriculum, to highlight the characteristics of Environment as Curriculum. Next, various educational views, like view of teachers, view of learning and view of knowledge, are explicated, in order that the nature and characteristics of Environment as Curriculum are understood more clearly and comprehensively.The development and exploitation of Environment as Curriculum is presented in Chapter three. Based on English teaching and by presenting optimal cases of environment creation, this chapter studies the development of Environment as Curriculum, by probing into four aspects:objective design, content development, realization of the functions of Environment as Curriculum and result evaluation.