About Journal of Qilu Normal University

Journal of Qilu Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Qilu Normal University, known in Chinese as Qilu Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao, is the Chinese-language academic journal of Qilu Normal University in Jinan, Shandong Province, China. It is the scholarly journal of a provincial teacher-training university in the Shandong capital, publishing education, humanities and science research with a teacher-education focus. Among Chinese university journals it belongs to the normal-university xuebao tradition, in which the journal of a teachers' institution serves both general scholarship and the professional study of teaching itself.

The name Qilu is the classical compound for Shandong, joining the ancient states of Qi and Lu, and it signals the university's provincial rather than merely municipal remit. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and no claim is made here about the journal's numbering, frequency or indexing.

Origins in 1948 and the road to the present name in 2010

The university's predecessor was founded in 1948 as the education school of East China University, established that September as the Shandong College of Education in the closing phase of the Chinese civil war period, initially at Yidu, now Qingzhou. In 1949 the school relocated to Jinan. The following decades brought the repeated renamings typical of Chinese education-cadre institutions: an education administration cadre institution in 1949, a secondary teachers' training course and then school in the early 1950s, division in 1956 into accelerated teacher-training and education-cadre institutions, further changes in 1957 and 1958, and, in 1960, the name Shandong Education Institute, or Shandong Institute of Education, under which the institution worked for much of the later twentieth century, with a further provincial normal-college name in 1978 recorded in its histories.

In April 2010, with the approval of the Ministry of Education and the Shandong provincial government, the institution was restructured and renamed Qilu Normal University, in Chinese Qilu Shifan Xueyuan, literally Qilu Normal College. Some English sources give 2012 for the new name, but the university's own accounts and the main reference histories agree on April 2010, and that is the date used here. The renaming marked its consolidation as a full-time public undergraduate normal university after more than six decades serving Shandong's teacher-training and education-cadre systems.

The university today: two campuses in the Spring City

Qilu Normal University is a public, full-time undergraduate normal university run by the Shandong provincial government, located in Jinan, the provincial capital, renowned as the Spring City for its numerous artesian springs. It has two campuses, Lixia, the downtown campus, and Zhangqiu, together covering about 849,800 square metres, roughly 1,300 mu, in institutional descriptions, with a building area recorded at around 200,000 to 304,500 square metres in different accounts and a library collection of more than 1.3 million paper books.

Its teaching is organised in some sixteen teaching units in recent institutional descriptions, spanning literature, languages, history, geography, social work, tourism, mathematics, sciences including chemistry and chemical engineering, education and the arts. In 2018 it passed the Ministry of Education's qualification assessment of undergraduate teaching work, and in 2019 it was among the first batch of proofing institutions in Shandong to pass certification for primary-education teacher training. A journal published by such an institution draws its authors and its agenda from that full range, with education at the centre.

Teacher education as the journal's defining focus

The feature that distinguishes this journal from a purely general xuebao is its host's mission. Qilu Normal University exists principally to prepare teachers, above all for Shandong's primary and secondary schools, and to support the province's basic-education system through training, research and the continuing development of serving teachers. Its predecessor institutions spent decades as the province's education institute, training education administrators and in-service teachers rather than school-leavers, and that adult, system-facing heritage distinguishes it from normal universities founded purely as pre-service colleges.

For the journal, that heritage means education research is not one subject among many but the institutional core: pedagogy, curriculum and subject teaching, primary education, teacher professional development and education management sit naturally at the head of its contents, with the humanities and sciences that future teachers will teach arranged around them. The description on which this profile is based records exactly that pattern, education, humanities and science research with a teacher-education focus, published from the provincial capital.

Scope across humanities and sciences

Within its education-centred frame, the journal's scope is broad. Humanities and social-science scholarship can reflect the university's strengths in Chinese language and literature, history, geography, foreign languages, social work and tourism, fields represented in its schools of literature, foreign languages, and history and societal development. Science scholarship reflects mathematics and the natural sciences, including the applied chemistry and chemical engineering taught in its School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

That breadth matters for a normal university's journal because its readers are themselves generalists in formation. A primary-school teacher needs scholarship on children's literature, mathematics pedagogy, local geography and school management in the same professional world, and a journal that publishes across those fields mirrors the integrated character of basic education itself, rather than the specialised structure of research-university publishing.

Jinan and Shandong as a research setting

Jinan gives the journal a distinctive setting. The capital of Shandong, a province of some one hundred million people, it is a historic city built around its springs, among them Baotu Spring, and it stands between Mount Tai to the south and the Yellow River, which flows past its northern districts. Qilu culture, the scholarly shorthand for Shandong's combined Qi and Lu heritage, joins the statecraft and openness associated with ancient Qi, whose capital was at modern Zibo, to the ritual, educational and Confucian traditions of Lu, Confucius's home state, centred on Qufu.

A normal university named for that combined heritage, publishing from the provincial capital, is well placed to carry scholarship on Shandong's history, geography, literature and education, and on how Qilu culture is taught in the province's schools. Its Zhangqiu campus places part of the university in one of Jinan's historic eastern districts, long associated with its own local culture and cast-iron craft traditions, adding a further local layer to the institution's setting.

A 2024 marker: cooperation in astronomy education

One recent event, recorded in reference histories of the university, illustrates the breadth its journal's community now reaches. On 21 March 2024 in Beijing, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Qilu Normal University signed an agreement connected with astronomy cooperation and education. For a provincial normal university, partnership with the national observatory system signals an ambition to bring front-line science into teacher preparation, so that Shandong's school science teaching connects to national research institutions. It is the kind of development whose educational implications, for curriculum and teacher training, belong naturally in a normal university's scholarly conversation.

Place in Chinese normal-university publishing

China's normal universities and colleges form a distinct tier of higher education, charged with supplying the school system, and most publish journals in the xuebao form. A normal university's journal typically combines general disciplinary scholarship with a professional education literature that research-university journals publish less of: classroom studies, textbook and curriculum analysis, teacher-training programme evaluation and regional school-system research. Those contents rarely travel internationally, since they are written in Chinese for a domestic professional audience, but within China they form part of the working literature of education.

The Journal of Qilu Normal University sits in that tradition, with the added particularity of its host's history as a provincial education institute. Journals of former education institutes tend to speak to the in-service system, to administrators, trainers and serving teachers, as well as to pre-service academics, and that dual address is a reasonable expectation for a journal whose institution spent from 1948 to 2010 principally in that role before taking a normal university's name.

Readership and authorship

The journal's readership is domestic and professional: the university's own staff and students, education researchers at other Shandong and Chinese institutions, and the province's wider teaching community, including the schoolteachers and education administrators whose formation the university exists to support. Published in Chinese from the provincial capital, it is positioned to be read within the Shandong basic-education system it serves.

Authorship is drawn principally from the university's teaching units across education, humanities and sciences, supplemented by contributors from other institutions, particularly in education research, where a provincial normal university's journal offers a venue for studies of Shandong schools and teacher-training practice that authors elsewhere in the province have reason to use.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed as a whole, the Journal of Qilu Normal University is the scholarly journal of Shandong's provincial normal university in Jinan, an institution founded in 1948 as an education college, relocated to the capital in 1949, long known as the Shandong Institute of Education, and renamed in April 2010. Its education, humanities and science scope is organised around the purpose its name declares: the preparation and support of teachers for one of China's most populous provinces.

Its continuing role is to sustain that professional scholarship in print: research on teaching and teacher formation, on the subjects Shandong's teachers teach, and on the Qilu cultural heritage of the province they teach in, produced in the Spring City by the institution the province maintains for exactly that work.