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Home > Chapter 4 > 1. What is environment? > 1. Check your understanding

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
  1. What is environment?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  2. What is development?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
  3. How do children’s experiences in the environment influence their learning and development?
     1. Check your understanding
     2. Extend your understanding
     3. Apply your understanding
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1. Check your understanding

Environment: Environment can be interpreted as people’s surroundings, including the natural, supernatural, and human made world. Definitions of environment are influenced by time and culture because, for example, human-made environments are created to meet human needs.

Built environments: Built environments are human-made or modified physical surroundings such as parks, homes, and schools. According to Foucault, this built environment is never neutral. For example, school buildings are constructed such that children are organized, managed, and disciplined in ways that reinforce the power of teachers and other authority figures.

Unbuilt environments: Unbuilt environments are the unmodified physical surroundings such as the ecosphere.

Relational bioecological developmental systems perspective: Bornstein and Leventhal (2015) envisioned development as being contingent on interrelationships between people, contexts, processes, and time. Environments are developmental contexts or microsettings and these different contexts interact with, and are influenced by, one another.

Foucault: Philosopher Michel Foucault theorized that the built environment of the school is constructed to reinforce the power of authorities (such as the teacher). When children’s routines, seating, and movement within the classroom are regulated, it reinforces this power.

Indigenous/Aboriginal worldviews: In Indigenous or Aboriginal worldviews, everything is seen as interconnected and relationships to others and to the land are central.

Supernatural phenomena: Supernatural phenomena are those which cannot be explained by scientific investigation such as information derived from dreams or by possession or diviners. Froebel, Steiner, and Montessori’s approaches were all informed by supernatural elements and beliefs.

Agentic materials: Froebel conceived of materials as agentic, having a relationship with children. Posthumanist scholars view materials and nonhuman animals as having the ability to “speak back” to children (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, and Blaise, 2012).