Nurturing knowledge

By Liao Fangzhou Source:Global Times Published: 2014-11-16 18:33:01

The Programme of Sino-French Education for Research, a joint postgraduate program sponsored by East China Normal University (ECNU) and École Normale Supérieure (ENS), was officially extended Tuesday for 12 more years.

The four presidents of ENS Paris, ENS Cachan, ENS Lyon and ENS Rennes joined ECNU President Chen Qun at the university to sign the new contract. They said it was the first time the four had ever met outside France.

Set up in 2014, ENS Rennes was the newest member of ENS. ENS Rennes President Patrice Quinton said he believed scientific research was the most important way to nurture international knowledge.

The program, which started in 2002, has recruited 355 master's degree students and 115 doctorate students from China to study at ENS over the last 12 years. They majored in subjects including mathematics, physics, chemistry, European studies and life sciences.

Jean-François Pinton, the president of ENS Lyon, identified language as a challenge for the program's students, but said the college did its best to help them overcome it.

"Though many of them already spoke pretty good French before they left for France, they still faced language problems when they actually arrived there," Pinton said. "Therefore we motivated our faculty and students to help the Chinese students with their French so that they could adapt to the classrooms and labs, and eventually complete their dissertations."

Under the new contract, the program will add computer science and pedagogy to the subjects it offers. Chen, the ECNU President, added that the new contract mentions specific plans to help improve the French of the Chinese students.

The program has gone beyond educating graduate students. Professors from both sides said they made friends with each other through tutoring students, and took their cooperation to a new level by applying for projects and publishing papers together.

While the professor-to-professor cooperation was spontaneous, the new contract makes it an official part of the program.

So far, more than 50 students have earned degrees from both ECNU and ENS through the joint program. Fourteen became faculty at ECNU, while the rest teach at other prestigious Chinese institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Renmin University of China. Others took jobs at multinational companies like Dow Chemical Company and Standard Chartered Bank.

Many of the 14 ECNU faculty said they remained close with their tutors at ENS after graduation. Some said they sent their published papers to their French tutors in hope of impressing them and asked for their advice about the syllabuses of new lectures they were opening at ECNU, one of them being French History.

Over the years, the China Scholarship Council has sponsored more than 90 students to take part in the joint program. Zhang Ning, the organization's deputy secretary-general, attended the event and signed a contract with ENS to continue the funding.

"The government gives particular support to this university-level program," Zhang said. "We hope that through the project, there will be more Sino-French ambassadors who are skilled in both Chinese and French, and have a promising ability to innovate."

Bernard Nedelec, the deputy Consul-General of France in Shanghai, added ECNU has welcomed about 120 established researchers from France to lecture at the university since the program started. Some of these scholars are members of the French Académie des Sciences.

Nedelec pointed out that the program has become a successful example of scientific research cooperation between elite universities in China and France, which perfectly echoes what Vice Premier Liu Yandong and the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said recently about the two countries continuing high-level academic collaboration. "The goal is that by 2020, there will be 80,000 Chinese students studying in France," Nedelec said.

The presidents of ENS Lyon, ENS Paris, ENS Cachan and ENS Rennes with ECNU President Chen Qun (middle) at the signing ceremony of a Sino-French postgraduate program Tuesday



 

ENS Rennes President Patrice Quinton (right) holds up his caricature. Photos: Courtesy of Chen Ying



 

Posted in: Society, Metro Shanghai

blog comments powered by Disqus