Environments that Educate: The Teacher's Perspective and use of Classrooms Decoration in a Chinese Kindergarten

There is a connection between the physical environment of the school and the development and learning of children in early childhood education. Institutional aspects and pedagogical proposals are reflected in teachers' actions regarding the classroom space. The aim of this study was to analyze how kindergarten teachers in Shanghai, China, use and recreate the classroom space according to the school 's pedagogical objectives, trying to answer the question “how do the teachers decorate the space according to the pedagogical proposal of the school?”. Trata-se de um estudo de caso relacionado ao ambiente físico de um kindergarten. The present article sought to explore how decorative elements were arranged in the classroom and hallways of the school from the teachers' perspective and to analyze the motivations related to these dynamics. Observations were conducted in a class of 5 and 6 year old children over a three-month period, and two teachers participated in semi-structured interviews. The data collected was analyzed using the concept of affectivation and the notion of physical school space usage proposed by Périard and Liu (2020). The findings suggest that classroom decoration was employed in that school as a significant pedagogical strategy to support children's development and learning.