About Journal of Hefei Normal University

Journal of Hefei Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Hefei Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Hefei Normal University in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. Its Chinese title is Hefei Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao. It publishes education, humanities and science research for Anhui's basic-education system, as the scholarly journal of the provincial capital's teacher-training university. The host institution has trained the province's teachers, principals and education administrators for seven decades, and its journal addresses that professional community as well as academic researchers.

No ISSN for the journal was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is stated here.

Founded in 1955 as Anhui Education College

The university's predecessor, Anhui Education College, was founded in 1955, in some institutional accounts described from its origin as a Hefei in-service education college for teachers of primary and secondary schools. For half a century its work centred on the in-service training and continuing education of Anhui's serving teachers, a mission distinct from pre-service teacher colleges: its students were already in classrooms, returning to study.

In 2007 the institution was restructured into a provincial full-time general undergraduate college and took its present name, Hefei Normal University. The change converted a provincial education college into a full undergraduate university while keeping its teacher-education brand. It has since become a master's degree-granting institution, was among the early implementers of the national Guo Pei Plan for teacher training, and was one of the first pilot schools for the Excellent Teacher Training Program. The journal's history follows the institution's: a publication rooted in teacher continuing education that now serves a comprehensive undergraduate university.

The university today

Hefei Normal University has three campuses, Sanxiaokou, Jinxiu (also rendered Jinxi) and Binhu, covering about 1,295 mu in total. University profiles describe fourteen to fifteen schools and colleges, some fifty-seven to fifty-eight undergraduate programmes and a body of about 15,700 full-time students, with a teaching staff of more than a thousand full-time teachers. Its library holds about 1.24 million paper books.

The university hosts a concentration of the province's teacher-education infrastructure: the national training base for primary and secondary school teachers in the central and western regions, the Anhui Provincial Primary and Secondary School Teachers' Continuing Education Center, the Anhui Education Management Cadre Training and Guidance Center, and the provincial teacher qualifications identification centre. It leads the Anhui Basic Education Development Alliance, houses the Anhui arm of the Tao Xingzhi Research Association, and established the Hefei Football Academy, the first football academy in Anhui Province. Its research platforms include a provincial key laboratory of electronic system simulation and a collaborative innovation centre for basic-education reform and development.

Education research at the journal's core

The clean record for this journal states its remit plainly: education, humanities and science research for Anhui's basic-education system. In practice that means the journal is a venue for studies of curriculum reform, classroom teaching, teacher professional development, school management and education policy as they affect Anhui's primary and secondary schools. The university describes itself as the main expert unit for the province's basic-education curriculum reform, and its journal is a natural channel through which that expertise reaches the schools.

The Guo Pei Plan, the national programme for training teachers in central and western China under which the university is a demonstration implementer, and the Excellent Teacher Training Program both generate publishable work: evaluations of training models, studies of rural teacher development, and subject-specific pedagogy. For a journal of this kind, such applied education research is not a sideline but the centre of its purpose, read by the teachers and administrators the university trains.

Tao Xingzhi and the university's educational tradition

The presence of the Anhui Tao Xingzhi Research Association at the university connects the journal to one of China's most influential educational thinkers. Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946), born in Anhui, founded the philosophy of life education and the rural normal school movement, arguing that education, life and society are inseparable and that teachers should be trained for the villages that needed them most. A normal university in his home province that hosts his research association signals the tradition its education scholarship claims: practical, rural-facing and reform-minded.

That tradition suits the journal's audience. Anhui is a populous province with a large rural school system, and the questions Tao posed, how to train good teachers for ordinary schools and how education serves social life, remain the working questions of the province's basic-education research.

Humanities and science beyond education

The journal is not confined to pedagogy. As the university expanded into a comprehensive undergraduate institution after 2007, its publishing broadened with it. The humanities side carries literature, history and related research from the university's colleges; the institution's earlier profiles noted research groups in ancient books, the history of foreign education, Chinese poetry and the arts. The science side carries work from fields including mathematics, chemistry, in earlier accounts coordination chemistry was a noted strength, optical and electronic information science, reflected today in the provincial key laboratory of electronic system simulation, and life sciences, including the China Southern Blueberry Engineering Technology Research Center hosted at the university.

This combination, education research at the core with general humanities and science around it, is the standard pattern of a Chinese normal university journal, adapted here to a university whose origin in continuing education gives the education content unusual depth and a ready readership among serving professionals.

Hefei: capital, science city and hometown of Bao Zheng

Hefei is the capital of Anhui, located in the centre of the province between the Yangtze and Huai rivers, beside Chaohu Lake. It is an ancient city with more than two thousand years of history, known historically as Luzhou, remembered as a battleground of the Three Kingdoms period, and celebrated as the hometown of Bao Zheng (999–1062), the Northern Song official who became China's enduring symbol of impartial justice; his ancestral hall, cemetery and memorial park stand in the city. The statesman Li Hongzhang was also a Hefei native.

In its modern identity Hefei is one of China's designated science and education cities, a comprehensive national science centre and home to the University of Science and Technology of China and to institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A teacher-training university in this city serves two worlds at once: the province's school system, for which it trains teachers and administrators, and a capital-city academic environment of national research institutions. The journal reflects that position, publishing school-focused research from an address in one of China's science cities.

The journal in China's normal-university publishing

China's normal universities and colleges publish journals that blend education research with their institutions' general scholarship, and the Journal of Hefei Normal University is a representative example with a distinctive history. Most of its peers descend from pre-service normal schools; this journal's host descends from a 1955 education college for serving teachers, and the university still operates the province's teacher continuing-education and cadre-training centres. The journal therefore speaks to practising teachers and school leaders as directly as to academics.

Reading the journal today

Read today, the journal documents scholarship in service of Anhui's schools: curriculum and training research from the province's principal teacher-education institution in the capital, set among the humanities and science output of a university of some fifteen thousand students. Its seven-decade line back to the Anhui Education College of 1955, and its links to the Guo Pei Plan, the Excellent Teacher Training Program and the Tao Xingzhi tradition, give it a clear place in the record of Chinese teacher education, the field in which its host university has worked since the year it was founded.