Abstract:

The relationship between normality and scholarship is an important issue in the history of higher education about the running of normal universities and teacher education. The combination of normal and academic nature is rooted in the tradition of running schools from Kwang Hua University, The Great China University to East China Normal University (ECNU). It is one of the fruitful and important explorations in the early stage of ECNU. In order to meet the needs of the development of national education, ECNU has completed its normal orientation as an independent normal university through the merger and establishment of private universities and the adjustment of colleges and departments. At the same time, it has completed the shaping of normal nature through measures such as leadership arrangement, ideological transformation and reformation of the training mode. The leader’s idea of a university, the guidance of Soviet experts and the task of teacher training in normal universities prompts ECNU to set up the research department, establish a series of journals and publishing houses in time. It provides platform guarantee and ensures that the academic nature can be established. After the great discussion on the direction of running normal universities, the equal emphasis on normal and academic has been established gradually. Under this concept, ECNU improves teachers’ education level and moves towards the road of subject integration by revising training objectives, exploring and extending the school system, expanding teacher training forms, adding special groups and new majors, and establishing a series of scientific research institutions. The historical exploration of normality and scholarship in the early stage of the school lays the foundation for ECNU’s idea of “unification of normal and academic” in the 1980s. It also has important enlightenment for normal universities on how to deal with the challenge of running teacher education in high-level comprehensive universities.

Key words: East China Normal University, normal and academic, teacher education