About Journal of Shenyang Normal University

Journal of Shenyang Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Shenyang Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Shenyang Normal University in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Its Chinese title is Shenyang Shifan Daxue Xuebao, following the standard pattern of the Chinese university journal, or xuebao, in which a university sponsors and edits a scholarly periodical under its own name. The clean record for this batch notes that the journal appears in social-science and natural-science editions. No International Standard Serial Number was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. The host is Liaoning's historic provincial normal university: founded in 1951 as the Northeastern Education College, renamed Shenyang Teachers College in 1953 as one of the first two undergraduate normal colleges in Northeast China, and formed in its present shape by the merger of 2001-2002 with Liaoning Educational College. Where the Journal of Shenyang University, covered immediately before this profile in the same batch, speaks for the city's comprehensive municipal university, this journal speaks for the province's teacher-education flagship. The two institutions share a city and a word in their names, and nothing else; their journals are entirely distinct publications.

Founded in 1951: the Northeastern Education College

Shenyang Normal University was established in 1951, in the first years of the People's Republic of China, when the new state faced an urgent shortage of trained teachers for the Northeast's rapidly expanding school system. Institutional histories record that in March 1951 the education ministry of the Northeast People's Government decided to establish a Northeast teachers college, which was renamed Northeastern Education College in April of the same year and formally approved in May 1951. In May 1953 the Northeast education authorities adjusted and merged the region's normal colleges, consolidating seven institutions across Liaodong, Liaoxi and Shenyang into three colleges, and in September 1953 the Northeastern Education College changed its name to Shenyang Teachers College. Sources note that Guo Moruo, the celebrated writer and scholar, inscribed the college's name. From that moment the institution stood as one of the first two undergraduate normal colleges established in Northeast China, a status its histories still emphasise. Its early leaders included the famous educationists Dong Chuncai, Che Xiangchen and Wu Boxiao, who successively headed the institution and connected the young college to the national tradition of modern Chinese pedagogy.

Renamings and survival: 1965, 1978 and the road to a university

The college's subsequent name changes trace the political history of modern China. In 1965 it was renamed Liaoning First Teachers College — Liaoning No. 1 Normal College in some translations — reflecting a provincial reorganisation of teacher training. In 1978, as China emerged from the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt its universities, the name Shenyang Teachers College was restored. For the following two decades the college continued as Shenyang's principal undergraduate institution for training secondary-school teachers, while Liaoning Educational College, a separate provincial institution, provided in-service training and further education for serving teachers across the province. The two halves of the teacher-education system — pre-service training in the college, in-service development in the educational college — were finally united at the turn of the century. In 2001 the Liaoning Provincial People's Government decided, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, to combine Shenyang Teachers College with Liaoning Educational College to establish Shenyang Normal University; the Ministry of Education formally approved the merger in March 2002. Sources differ by a year in dating the current name because the decision, approval and formal establishment straddle 2001 and 2002, but they agree on the substance: the present university is the 1951 college, enlarged by merger into a comprehensive normal university.

The modern university: colleges and disciplines

Shenyang Normal University is subordinate to the Liaoning Provincial People's Government and is described in its own introductions as a comprehensive university covering eight or nine subject areas: philosophy, economics, law, pedagogy, literature, science, engineering, management and art studies. Older reference accounts describe eighteen colleges divided into some thirty departments; more recent introductions count twenty-six colleges. Named units in the sources include the College of Educational Science together with the Liaoning Provincial Basic Education Teaching Research Training Center, the Science and Information Software College, the International Business College, the Information Technology College, the Foreign Language College, the College of Arts and Design and the College of Dramatic Arts. The School of Foreign Languages, founded in June 1953, is one of the earliest departments of the institution, a survivor from the founding reorganisation of that year. The School of International Education descends from an international cultural exchange centre established in 1985, renamed an international cultural exchange college in 1993 and an international education college in 2002, and the university offers undergraduate majors including Chinese language and Chinese international education for the teaching of Chinese abroad. Following the merger, the university relocated from its previous urban site to a new campus in Shenyang's northern suburbs, giving the enlarged institution room to operate as a single university.

Teacher education at the centre

Normal universities in China — the word normal follows the French école normale, a school for training teachers — exist to staff a school system, and Shenyang Normal University's structures show that mission operating at provincial scale. The presence within the university of the Liaoning Provincial Basic Education Teaching Research Training Center means that the institution that trains Liaoning's new teachers also houses the centre that researches basic-education teaching and trains serving teachers for the whole province. Its College of Educational Science supplies the theoretical core: pedagogy, educational psychology and curriculum studies. Around that core, the subject colleges — foreign languages since 1953, literature, sciences, arts and drama — train teachers in the subjects they will teach, while newer colleges in information software, information technology and international business reflect the university's expansion into a comprehensive institution serving the wider economy. The journal inherits this entire structure. An article in its social-science edition may report a classroom study conducted through the provincial training centre; an article in its natural-science edition may present subject research by the scientists who teach future science teachers. That double character, scholarship about teaching alongside scholarship in the taught subjects, defines the normal-university xuebao as a genre, and this journal is one of its oldest Northeast examples.

Shenyang and Liaoning: the setting

The journal is published in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province and the largest city in Northeast China, on the Northeast Plain north of the Hun River. Shenyang was the Manchu capital under Nurhaci from 1625, known as Shengjing in Chinese and Mukden in Manchu, until the Qing court moved to Beijing in 1644; it was the warlord Zhang Zuolin's capital in the 1920s, the scene of the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, and after 1949 one of China's principal heavy-industry centres. It has long functioned as the education and cultural centre of the Northeast, housing more than twenty universities and colleges. For a normal university, the relevant hinterland is even wider than the city: Liaoning Province, with its industrial cities of Anshan, Fushun, Benxi, Dalian and Jinzhou and its extensive rural counties, is the school system the university serves. When Shenyang Normal University was founded in 1951, the Northeast was the industrial heartland of the new China and its cities were building schools as fast as factories; the college's graduates staffed those schools for generations. The journal's education research is written against that provincial canvas, and its regional studies address western and central Liaoning from the vantage point of the capital.

What the journal publishes: two editions

The clean record states that the journal appears in social-science and natural-science editions, the standard two-stream arrangement for a comprehensive Chinese normal university. The social-science edition carries philosophy, economics, law, education, literature, history, management and art, with education — pedagogy, teacher development, basic-education research from the provincial centre — as its distinguishing core. The natural-science edition carries mathematics, physics, chemistry, life science, information science and engineering, the subject scholarship of the colleges that train Liaoning's science teachers. Both editions serve the normal-university pattern in which subject research and teaching research continually inform each other. Readers citing the journal should identify the edition as well as the title and year, since the two editions run as separate publication streams. It should also be said plainly what the journal is not: it is not a specialist education journal in the Western sense, publishing nothing but pedagogy, nor a general science journal. It is a university xuebao, comprehensive across its host's work, whose centre of gravity in education and whose seventy-year teacher-training lineage give it a flavour no other Shenyang title reproduces.

Distinguishing this journal from its Shenyang neighbours

Shenyang's crowded university district makes precise identification essential, and this journal has more near-namesakes than most. The Journal of Shenyang Normal University belongs to the provincial normal university founded in 1951 as Northeastern Education College. It is distinct from the Journal of Shenyang University, the comprehensive municipal university's title covered immediately before it in this batch; from the journals of Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang Aerospace University and Shenyang Jianzhu University, all different institutions; and, further afield, from Northeast Normal University in Changchun and Liaoning Normal University in Dalian, the region's other normal universities. Its Chinese title, Shenyang Shifan Daxue Xuebao, with the word Shifan, normal, at its heart, is the reliable identifier. The historical test is equally clear: if an institution's story begins in 1951 with the Northeastern Education College, passes through the 1953 renaming at which Guo Moruo inscribed its name, and culminates in the 2001-2002 merger with Liaoning Educational College, it is this university, and the xuebao under discussion is its journal.

Readership and role

The journal's first readership is the teacher-education community of Liaoning: the university's own faculty and graduate students, the researchers of its provincial basic-education centre, and the serving teachers whose professional development the university directs. Its education articles speak directly to that audience, while its subject articles serve the academic development of the lecturers who train teachers across the humanities and sciences. Beyond the province, the journal contributes Northeast evidence to China's national scholarship on teacher education, a field in which an institution founded in 1951 as one of the Northeast's first two undergraduate normal colleges carries inherent historical weight. For Shenyang Normal University itself, the journal records research output across nine disciplines, connects a teaching-centred university to national scholarly conversations, and preserves in print the continuing story of an institution led in its youth by educationists of national fame. Seven decades after its founding college opened, the Journal of Shenyang Normal University remains what its lineage made it: a major Northeast teacher-education title, and the scholarly voice of Liaoning's provincial normal university.