ABSTRACT
Nanjing Normal University (NJNU), was founded as the Nanjing Christian Union University for women by missionaries from the United States in 1912, just after the founding of the Chinese Republic (see Chapter 3). The original campus has separate, pavilion-style buildings, gardens and leafy walkways. Students here are training to teach in junior and senior middle schools. (Normal Schools, training elementary school teachers up to certificate level have been closing since the mid-1990s, their courses transferred to universities, see Case study 6.) The Department of Early Childhood Education at NJNU also provides courses on the education of pre-school deaf children, which was unusual for a university in the early 1990s. There were innovatory aspects of the provision that interested me, relating to entry routes, assessment strategies and distance learning.
