About Journal of Jilin Normal University

Journal of Jilin Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Jilin Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Jilin Normal University in Siping, Jilin Province, Northeast China. Its Chinese title is Jilin Shifan Daxue Xuebao, and it appears in the two forms common for large Chinese university journals: a philosophy and social sciences edition and a natural science edition. The journal follows the standard pattern of the Chinese university journal, or xuebao, in which a university sponsors and edits a scholarly periodical under its own name. No International Standard Serial Number was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. A note on identity is essential: Jilin Normal University, the journal's host, is the provincial teacher-training university based in Siping, with a second campus in Changchun. It is a different institution from Jilin University, the large national comprehensive university in Changchun, and the two must not be confused; this journal belongs to the normal university in Siping alone.

Founded in 1958: Siping Normal College's small beginning

Jilin Normal University was founded on 15 September 1958 as Siping Normal College. Its beginnings were modest in a way that institutional histories still record in precise detail: at its founding the college had only 29 teaching staff and 285 students, taught in four majors, Chinese, mathematics, geoscience and political history. It did not yet have a campus of its own; it borrowed the second floor of the west building of Siping No. 1 Middle School, a student dormitory, as its school building and began work there. In 1960 the college recruited its first cohort of 129 students into a four-year undergraduate programme, and in the same year Siping Normal School was transferred to the college, enlarging its enrolment and staff. In 1973, with the approval of the authorities, the college was raised in status as Siping Normal College, and through the following decades it grew into the principal institution for teacher training in the southern part of Jilin Province. The journal's own origins lie in this college period, when a growing faculty first required a house periodical in which to publish its research.

Renamed in 2002: becoming Jilin Normal University

On 21 March 2002, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, Siping Normal College was renamed Jilin Normal University. The new name recognised both the institution's scale and its mandate: it was no longer one normal college among several but the province's namesake normal university, the flagship of teacher education for the whole of Jilin. On 1 December 2004 the provincial government designated it a key university in Jilin Province, a status it retains. The journal took the university's new name at the same transition, becoming the Journal of Jilin Normal University, and its two-edition structure reflects the university's growth: a single college journal could no longer contain the output of a multi-disciplinary university, so social-science and natural-science scholarship were given editions of their own. Subsequent development has kept the pattern of growth. The university today operates two campuses, in Siping and in Changchun, and its system integrates undergraduate, postgraduate, international and continuing education, with teacher education as its defining feature and coordinated development across many disciplines.

The university today: scale, campuses and teaching awards

Provincial government sources describe a university whose Siping and Changchun campuses together cover about one million square metres, housing 21 colleges, two teaching departments, 43 research institutes and 182 laboratories. The university offers 67 undergraduate majors covering nine academic disciplines: literature, history, law, education, science, engineering, the arts, management and economics. Its School of Marxism has been selected among the first batch of key Marxist colleges in Jilin Province. The distinction the university itself prizes most is in teaching: it has won national teaching achievement awards for seven consecutive years, and provincial sources note that it is the only provincial university in Jilin to have done so. Alongside its degree programmes, the university serves as the training centre for Jilin's provincial teachers at all levels, and reference sources record that it has trained more than 22,000 teachers in recent years through its seminars and classes. A journal published within such an institution draws on a large, research-active faculty and an education mission that reaches into every school system in the province.

Teacher education at the centre

Teacher education is not one faculty among many at Jilin Normal University; it is the institution's reason for existing, and it shapes the journal accordingly. The university is described in provincial sources as Jilin's principal teacher-training centre, and it hosts the training structures through which the province's serving teachers at all levels receive continuing professional education. Research on pedagogy, on subject teaching in Chinese, mathematics and the sciences, on the history and theory of education, and on the practical problems of schools in the province therefore forms a standing core of the journal's social-science edition. This is scholarship with an immediate professional readership: the teachers whom the university trains, and retrains, across Jilin are the natural audience for its education research, and many of them are the university's own graduates. The journal thus closes a loop between research and practice that purely academic periodicals do not: findings published in its pages are read by the same provincial school system that the university exists to serve.

The two editions and what they publish

The philosophy and social sciences edition of the Journal of Jilin Normal University carries the university's humanities and social research: Chinese language and literature, history, law, education, economics and management, together with the Marxist theory work of its key School of Marxism. The natural science edition carries mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, geoscience and engineering research from the university's science faculties and its 182 laboratories. The division into editions is the standard solution adopted by China's larger normal universities, whose journals must serve two distinct scholarly communities with different citation cultures and review standards. Between them, the editions publish the research record of a university of more than twenty colleges, including the work of its 43 research institutes. For outside readers, the editions are also a map of the institution: the range of topics they carry, from Siping-based regional studies to laboratory science, shows how far the university has travelled from the four majors, Chinese, mathematics, geoscience and political history, with which it began in 1958.

Siping: the city behind the journal

Siping, the journal's home city, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Jilin Province, set on the plain between Changchun to the northeast and Liaoning Province to the south. It is a railway and agricultural centre rather than a provincial capital, and Jilin Normal University is its principal institution of higher education, which gives the university, and its journal, a civic weight that a similar institution in a capital city would not have. Regional scholarship in the journal reflects this setting: the history, agriculture, environment and society of the Siping prefecture and the wider southwest Jilin plain are studied from within, by the scholars who live there. The university's second campus in Changchun, the provincial capital, extends its reach without displacing its Siping identity; the institution remains, in name and in mission, the normal university of the whole province administered from Siping. The journal is consequently both a provincial and a prefectural publication: the scholarly voice of Jilin's teacher education, edited in the southwest Jilin city where that system was founded in 1958.

Distinguishing the journal from other Jilin titles

Because Jilin Province contains several universities with similar names, the identity of this journal is worth stating precisely. The Journal of Jilin Normal University is published by the Siping-based provincial normal university founded in 1958 as Siping Normal College and renamed in 2002. It is not a journal of Jilin University, the much larger national university in Changchun, whose own extensive family of journals belongs to a different institution with a different history. Nor is it the journal of the other normal institutions of the province, such as those in Changchun, Tonghua or Baicheng, each of which publishes its own xuebao under its own name. Librarians and researchers citing the Jilin Shifan Daxue Xuebao are citing the Siping university's periodical, and the two-edition structure, philosophy and social sciences alongside natural science, is one of its identifying marks. Accuracy on this point matters for the scholarly record, because the similar names of Chinese normal universities are a standing source of citation confusion.

The xuebao tradition and the journal's place in it

Within China's family of university journals, the Journal of Jilin Normal University represents the mature form of the provincial normal university xuebao. Such journals are edited inside the university, published in Chinese, and serve as the institution's research record, a venue for faculty publication and a channel of scholarly exchange. What distinguishes this title is the scale and standing of its host: a provincial key university, the province's principal teacher-training centre, and a repeated national teaching-award winner, publishing in two editions across the full disciplinary range of a comprehensive university. Its history also embodies the characteristic trajectory of Chinese higher education since 1958, from a borrowed schoolroom with 29 staff to a two-campus university of 21 colleges, with the journal growing at each stage from college bulletin to university periodical to a two-edition scholarly title. Few documents show that national transformation more concretely than the run of a journal like this one.

Reading the journal today

For a first-time reader, the Journal of Jilin Normal University is best read as the research record of Jilin Province's teacher-training flagship. Its social-science edition shows how the province's educators study their own profession and region; its natural-science edition shows the laboratory research of a university that began, in part, as a geoscience and mathematics college in borrowed rooms. The journal is published in Chinese, and its primary audience is the Chinese scholarly community, above all the education researchers and subject scholars of the Northeast. No ISSN is claimed in this profile, because none was attested in the sources consulted. The verified outline of the title is nonetheless clear: a two-edition university journal, published in Siping by the key provincial normal university founded on 15 September 1958 and renamed in 2002, and not to be confused with any journal of Jilin University in Changchun.