Equity in Early Education Postdoctoral (E3) Fellowship

The Equity in Early Education Postdoctoral (E3) Fellowship Program trains the next generation of scholars to conduct research toward equitable, impactful, and sustainable early childhood care and education systems.

Applications open: October 1, 2024
Start date: Flexible, summer-fall 2025
Duration: 2 years
Eligibility: U.S. citizen or permanent resident; Must have doctoral degree prior to start date
Link to application

Why the E3 fellowship program? 

To reduce racial and economic inequalities in early childhood, the next generation of scholars will need to collaborate with communities and educational partners to co-produce a base of interdisciplinary scientific evidence. 

This program is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), grant number R305B220018, and housed at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.  The program is designed to train fellows to conduct work that is

• equity-focused—centering systemic equity as an outcome 
• interdisciplinary—examining individual development in the context of structural racial and economic inequality using a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches 
• responsive—centering the needs of children, families, the early childhood workforce, and other community stakeholders to co-develop new and effective practices, programs, and policies

What does the program consist of? 

The program will provide two years of support to four fellows. Fellows will train and work with four core faculty mentors at Stanford Graduate School of Education and have opportunities to collaborate with two faculty affiliates at the Stanford School of Medicine. 

Our postdoctoral fellows will work on active faculty projects examining 

• the effects of disparities in structural early childhood care and education (ECCE) opportunities
• heterogeneous effects of ECCE practices, programs, and policies 
• the importance of children’s and caregivers’ experiences, contexts, and identities 
• conceptualization and assessment of developmental outcomes. 

All projects are embedded in established education research-practice partnerships and collaborations with community organizations. These partnerships provide fellows with opportunities to learn to collaborate with practitioners and policymakers to identify urgent questions of practical relevance and to design studies to test pragmatic solutions, analyze data, and disseminate findings and implications.  

The program will also provide fellows with training in presenting and publishing their empirical research, communicating their work to policymakers and non-academic audiences, grant-writing, and effective strategies for navigating the job market. Fellows will attend seminars and speaker series and will be able to audit courses offered by the GSE to 

• strengthen or expand their analytic skills (via courses offered by the Center for Education Policy Analysis and the Education Data Science program)
• develop cultural competencies (via events organized by the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education program and the initiative on Learning Differences and the Future of Special Education) 
• gain partnership experiences with practitioners and policymakers (via courses for the Certificate Program in Partnership Research and engagement with other relevant research centers)