Announcement: New Call for Stanford FabLearn Fellows!
The FabLearn program at Stanford University is pleased to open applications for the second cohort of FabLearn Fellows.
Each FabLearn Fellow — an educator in formal or informal education — will be a pioneer in generating open source resources for makerspaces and FabLabs all over the world, and a global ambassador communicating the value of making and digital fabrication in education.
The new cohort will join a growing community of Senior FabLearn Fellows who will mentor and guide new FabLearn Fellows in these efforts.
This 12 month commitment (September 2016 – August 2017) will provide a group of teachers and educators with the resources to transform their own successful education activities and experiences in makerspaces and FabLabs into shareable, open source educational materials, and also analyze and collect data on the effects and outcomes of hands-on learning in education. This program targets teachers or educators who are actively using or building Fablabs and Makerspaces in schools, museums, and other learning spaces for young people.
Your participation will contribute to high-impact research and outreach around the world.
We seek to answer the following questions:
How can we generate an open-source set of constructionist curricular materials well-adapted for Makerspaces and FabLabs in educational settings?
How are educators adapting their own curriculum and activities in face of these new “making” technologies, and how can they be better supported?
What challenges do educators face when trying to adopt project-based, constructionist, digital fabrication activities in their formal and informal learning spaces?
How are schools approaching teacher development, parental/community involvement, and issues around assessment?
Fellows’ activities will include:
Contributing to the open-source library of curricular resources for making and digital fabrication (created collectively by all the Fellows, with support from experts and designers at Stanford).
Engaging in collecting data about student’s activities in these learning spaces — such as surveys and short reports — to inform rigorous research about hands-on learning.
Sharing experiences. Fellows will have access to a private website where they will contribute short, twice-monthly reflective journal entries, and receive feedback from other fellows, teachers, scholars, and researchers. Fellows will also generate at least three public blog posts per year, which will be publicized to makerspaces, FabLabs, and other educational media outlets. We will also have regular video conferences with Fellows and other experts for experience-sharing.
Community building. FabLearn Fellows are expected to help create local communities with the Senior FabLearn Fellows to support other educators interested in constructionist hands-on learning. FabLearn Fellows will be invited to participate in the annual FabLearn conference held at Stanford University in October.
All materials created by Fellows as part of the FabLearn Fellows program will carry open source licenses (but Fellows will still be fully credited and maintain authorship over their materials), and all research data will be publicly accessible upon publication. We expect that these materials will result in collective books, publications, and web resources to help teachers worldwide integrate making and digital fabrication into their teaching.
Who should apply: Educators in formal and informal education (museums, after-school programs, foundations, outreach programs, etc.). You should be directly engaged in an existing maker-style program that serves a primarily K-12 age community. You must be able to share information about your program publicly. You are able to commit sufficient time to the writing, sharing, and community building aspects of this project.
Period: September 2016 – August 2017.
Stipend: Each Stanford FabLearn Fellow will receive a $3000 stipend for their participation.
Application: Application link. The application period for the 2016-17 FabLearn Fellows Program will be open from June 2, 2016 to July 15, 2016.
For questions, please email: claire@fablearn.net