Shanghai Normal University

History

Founded in 1954, SHNU was founded as 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 colleges were combined to form Shanghai Teachers College.

In 1972, it was merged into East China Normal University while the latter changed its name to Shanghai Normal University. In 1978 the Shanghai Teachers College was reestablished, 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 successively took in 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. Other units 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 23,743 full-time undergraduates, 4,613 graduates, 14,544 night school students and 682 long-term overseas students (studying for more than one year). The university has established cooperation and exchange relationships with 182 universities and cultural and academic institutions in 30 countries and regions.

Since its establishment, SHNU has trained more than 100,000 talents. Almost 70% of primary and middle school teachers, and almost 70% of school headmasters and principals are SHNU graduates. Among them there have been figures such as Tang Shengchang and Liu Jinghai, who are entitled Education Heroes in Shanghai, Wu Xiaozhong and Gao Runhua, who are excellent school principals at the 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 education undertakings in China.

Disciplines and majors

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 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 the Undergraduate Educational Highland project, and five SHNU majors — MICE Economy, Teacher Education, Chinese Language and Literature, Film and TV Communication and English — were selected as key programs of this project.

SHNU has two primary disciplines and 22 secondary disciplines for doctoral degree programs, two 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. The Urban Culture Research Center is the only key research base of Humanities in local universities approved by the Ministry of Education. There are municipal key laboratories in the field of galaxies and cosmology, three E-research institutes of urban culture, computational science and comparative linguistics, and a large number of major subjects in the process of further development at the municipal level or under the supervision of Shanghai Education Commission.

Faculty and staff

SHNU has a sound faculty structure with famous experts and scholars, and a large number of young and middle-age excellent teachers. The university has a staff of 2,990 people, including 1,713 professional teachers, among whom 247 are professors and 521 associate professors. 894 teachers, who occupy 65.9% of the faculty members, have been conferred with doctor’s or master's degrees, with 463 of them holding doctor’s degrees. In addition, the university has 516 part-time teachers, including five specially employed academician-level professors and 20 foreign teachers with long-term working contracts.