The Educational Development Fellows Program is a part-time (up to 10 hours per week) paid experiential learning opportunity at the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching. Since 2018, McMaster graduate students have been invited to apply for roughly ten-month appointments that allow them to gain educational development skills, develop an awareness of the professional field, and support the mission, vision, and mandate of the MacPherson Institute.
The EDF Program is organized around five learning outcomes. By participating in this program, we hope that Fellows will be able to:
- Describe what educational development is and what educational developers do;
- Establish a network of connections to educational developers across multiple contexts;
- Demonstrate educational development skills, abilities, and knowledge by engaging in evidence-based practice;
- Identify and discuss the scholarly teaching literature (e.g., SoTL) that informs educational development practice;
- Reflect on how organizational, administrative, and academic context influences educational developer practice.
Fellows participate in a wide variety of educational development activities including workshop design, facilitation, and moderation; module design, development, and review; resource development (e.g., guidebooks); consultations with faculty, staff, and graduate students; focus group facilitation; course observations; grant and award application review; conducting literature reviews, and attending MacPherson Institute staff events.
This program might be a good fit for you if you are interested in learning transferrable educational development skills and working with staff and other graduate students to enhance teaching and learning across campus. Calls for applications typically circulate in the spring; please sign up for the MacPherson Memo to learn when they are posted.
