On the morning of 28^th June, the Graduate School held a mobilization meeting and training session for the social practice of 2017’s short semester in the Lecture Hall of Ziqin Building. It was chaired by Xue Chenglong, vice director of Office of Academic Affairs and attended by more than 80 teachers and students, including Prof. Taotao, executive dean of Graduate School, Prof. Fang Ying, vice dean of Graduate School and director of Office of Academic Affairs, Prof. Zhu Dongliang of the Marxism school, Associate Professor Xu Lan of the Institute of Education, some teachers and representatives of the social practice teams which had won the funding.

        At the beginning of the meeting, Prof. Tao Tao made a mobilization speech. He said that Graduate school always placed great emphasis on the social practice work. Since 2013, more than 2000 graduate students had been funded to go to different places home and abroad. He pointed out that practice is the only path to truth, an important approach to train students’ creativity and ability, and an effective way for graduate students to deepen their understanding of the society and prepare for getting involved in the society. He took famous universities, like Harvard University and Peking University as examples to encourage students to go outside the campus, get involved in the society and conduct original research. In the end, he reminded students to put safety as their first priority, to employ scientific research methods, to leave the school with a sense of commitment, to further focus on the central major issues concerning national policy and people’s well being, and to strive to achieve fruitful research result.

Prof. Zhu Dongliang of the Marxism school made a special report themed as Guidelines of Field Research in Qualitative Research. With his own rich social research experience and thorough and vivid examples, he introduced the main points of implementation from preparation work to the field research of the qualitative study, including how to choose suitable respondents, right research methods, and etc. Graduate students present learned a lot from his speech.

Associate Professor Xu Lan of Institute of Education made a report titled as What Kind of Social Practice do We Need—the Transformation of Research on Social Sciences. She systematically and carefully introduced the methodological framework of social science research and taught the students to write application and practice report on social practice program to make the research report more academic and scientific. She also talked about how to transform perceptual fact description to rational concept analysis through scientific data analysis and then illustrate and reveal the social structure and rules behind those facts, which would serve as excellent guidance for graduate students when they summarized their results after the social practice.