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The first Piaget Research Center in China officially unveiled at ECNU

04/13/2023

The ECNU Piaget Research Center was unveiled yesterday at the same time as the Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology Symposium was being held. Well-known psychology experts and scholars from more than 60 universities including Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Renmin University of China, Fudan University, and Sun Yat-sen University attended the symposium. Meanwhile, the “ECNU Piaget Research Fund” was also established. Afterwards a book donation ceremony to the “Piaget Research Center”, the press conference of “Collected Works of Jean Piaget” by Henan University Press, and the launch ceremony of “Piaget and Education” Series by ECNU Press were held in succession.

Piaget, born in Switzerland, was one of the famous psychologists of the 20th century. His most important contribution to psychology was to turn Freud's random and unsystematic clinical observations into more scientific and systematic ones, which has subsequently empowered the long-term progress in clinical psychology. ECNU's Piaget research is well-known both at home and abroad. Lifelong Professor Li Qiwei is the first domestic Doctor of Psychology who chose Piaget's theory as the topic of his dissertation. He once worked at the Piaget Archives (currently the Piaget Research Center in Geneva), and the ten-volume “Collected Works of Jean Piaget” edited by him in 2020 has exerted significant academic impact in China. At the unveiling ceremony, Prof. Li Qiwei, who is now over 80 years old, gave a keynote speech titled “‘Ten Sentences’ about Piaget's Genetic Epistemology”, further condensing the content of Piaget's Genetic Epistemology into 10 keywords: knowledge, development, action, coordination, reflection, schema, construction, stage, logic and skill.

In the future, the Piaget Research Center will carry out research on a large-scale academic program: Piaget and Education, which is expected to have ten rolls of twenty volumes, about 20 million words; and the "Piaget Research Documentation Center" will be established. At present, the Center already holds more than 2,000 related books and it is estimated that by 2025, the Center will become the data center featuring the most complete materials and books on Piaget research and the most profound data resources in China.



Copy editor: Melody Zhang, Philip Nash  

Editor: Yvaine Lyu