A key university in Shanghai city, Shanghai Normal University (SHNU) is a comprehensive local university with salient features of teacher training and particular strength in liberal arts. The main undertakings of the university are undergraduate education with the chief aim of producing high level application-oriented talents.
History
Founded in 1954, SHNU was then named Shanghai Teachers Training College. In 1956 it was expanded into two colleges, Shanghai No. 1 Teachers College and Shanghai No. 2 Teachers College. Two years later, the two colleges were combined to form Shanghai Teachers College. From 1972 to 1978, it was known as Shanghai Normal University after combining four other ones including East China Normal University. In 1978 it was restored to Shanghai Teachers College, and was renamed as Shanghai Teachers University in 1984. It combined with Shanghai Teachers College of Technology in October 1994 to form a new Shanghai Normal University. From September 1997 to August 2003, SHNU took in successively the following units as its subordinates: Shanghai Teacher Training College, Department of Human Sanitation and Health of Huangling Teacher School, Shanghai Xingzhi Art School, and Shanghai Tourism Institute. The university has 16 colleges and 81 research bodies. Also located in SHNU are, among others, Shanghai Teachers Training Center, Shanghai College Teachers Training Center, and the Editorial Department of Academic Abstracts of Liberal Arts of College Journals.
Talent Cultivation
Currently, SHNU has an enrollment of 22,505 full-time undergraduates, 2,827 graduates, 13,061 night school students and 682 long-term overseas students (studying here for more than one year). The university has established cooperation and exchange relationships with 182 universities and cultural and academic institutions in 25 countries and regions. For 50-odd years since its establishment, SHNU has trained more than 100,000 talents of various kinds. Almost 70% of primary and middle school teachers,
and almost 70% of school headmasters and principals are SHNU graduates. Among them there have been marvelous figures such as Tang Shengchang and Liu Jinghai, who are entitled Educational Heroes in Shanghai, Wu Xiaozhong and Gao Runhua, who are excellent school principals at state level, and Shanghai Teacher Ethic Models Tong Yingying and Zhang Yuqing. These people are representatives of excellent students graduated from SHNU and engaged in educational undertakings in our country.
Disciplines and Majors
At present the university has 76 undergraduate disciplines related to 10 subjects, covering Philosophy, Economics, Law, Pedagogy, Literature, History, Science, Engineering, Management Theory and Agriculture. In addition, the major of Chinese Language and Literature was authorized by the Ministry of Education as National Liberal Arts Base for talent cultivation and academic research; and the major of Literature of Ancient China serves as one of the four key bases in the country. In 2005, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission launched Undergraduate Educational Highland project, and five of our majors including MICE Economy, Teacher Education, Chinese Language and Literature, Film and TV Communication and English were selected as key programs of this project. SHNU has 2 primary disciplines and 22 secondary disciplines for doctoral degree programs, 2 mobile post doctoral research center and 93 Master’s degree programs. After many years of solid work, the university has set up many subjects with their specific advantages and features. There are influential disciplines in the academic circle such as Chinese Language and Literature, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Pedagogy, Computational Mathematics and Astrophysics; and disciplines that have attracted wide attention in the society such as Art, Advertisement, Tourism Management, MICE Economy, Rare Earth Materials, and Plant Functional Gene. “Urban Culture Research Center” is the only key research base of Humanities in local universities approved by the Ministry of Education. In the university are also municipal key laboratories in the field of galaxies and cosmology, 3 E-research institutes of urban culture, computational science and comparative linguistics, and a large number of major subjects in the process of further development either at the municipal level or under the supervision of Shanghai Education Commission.
Faculty and Staff
SHNU has a sound faculty structure with a group of famous experts and scholars, and a large number of young and middle aged excellent teachers. At present, the university has a staff of 3,032 people, including 1,627 professional teachers, among whom 201 are professors and 461 associate professors. 894 teachers, who occupy 54.9% of the faculty member, have been conferred with doctor’s or master’s degrees, with 283 of them holding doctor’s degrees. In addition, the university has 500 part-time teachers, including 5 specially employed academician-level professors and 20 foreign teachers with long-term working contracts.
Resources
SHNU has two main campuses, Xuhui Campus and Fengxian Campus, covering an area of over 1.62 million square meters. The floor area of the school occupies 710,000 square meters, among which the classroom area is 67,000 square meters, students’ dorm area 239,000 square meters and in-door school labs and fieldwork space 60,000 square meters. Two Central libraries have housed 3.25 million books, 21 pieces of databank of electronic books and 4 stores of rare or important reference materials. The fixed assets of the whole university are as high as 1.27 billion yuan, among which teaching facilities and research equipments are valued as 315 million yuan.
