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 nine-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 six 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;
- Collaborate with various roles within the higher education professional community;
- Demonstrate educational development skills, abilities, and knowledge that enhance teaching and learning experiences at McMaster;
- Critically reflect on how societal, organizational, administrative, and academic contexts influence educational developer practice;
- Apply scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and educational development (SoED) literature, various scholarly works, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Decolonization, and Accessibility (EDIDA) approaches to educational developer practice;
- Articulate beliefs, actions, impacts, and future directions as an educational developer or educator.
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 transferable 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 or summer; please sign up for the MacPherson Memo to learn when they are posted.
