Joyful Learning

The Stanford Accelerator for Learning invites proposals for research or design projects that explore the mechanisms and impact of joyful learning.

The Stanford Accelerator for Learning seeks to accelerate solutions to the most pressing challenges facing learners. Housed at Stanford Graduate School of Education, the Stanford Accelerator for Learning is the first university-wide initiative connecting scholars across disciplines and with external partners to bridge research, innovation, practice, and policy, and bring quality scalable and equitable learning experiences to all learners, throughout the lifespan.

While knowledge and skill growth are standard measures of success in learning environments, transformative outcomes—such as coming to see the world in a new way, heightened interest, or a sense of belonging within a community of practice—are frequently overlooked.  Through this seed funding opportunity, the Accelerator will fund research that advances our capacity to study and design joyful learning experiences that inspire a sense of wonder, trigger inspiration, invite curiosity, cultivate an appreciation of beauty, support shared enjoyment in creative activities, and foster a desire to continue learning over time. These positive emotional responses are an underutilized resource not only for learning but also for collective healing and community revitalization, making them vital now as educators - informal and formal - work to reimagine learning after a sustained period of disruption to our educational systems.

This seed grant competition is organized to generate innovative approaches that will advance both the science of joyful learning and the design of environments promoting such learning. Early-stage work will catalyze cross-disciplinary collaborations for developing a deep and broad understanding of the forms of experience that nurture human inspiration and make visible the multidimensional nature of joyful learning across timescales and settings, with a focus on preK-12 learners, educators, and families. 

We encourage proposals from one of three categories: 

1. Investigations of existing joyful learning experiences. Examples: projects that identify mechanisms and conditions for joyful learning within specific programs known for their inspirational qualities and/or experiences within domains (e.g., visual arts, mathematics); co-located settings (e.g., home, school, outdoors); or online environments (e.g., projects exploring how and why popular gaming environments support creativity and learning).

2.  Design and pilot projects. Examples:  projects that design and then test environments that cultivate shared enjoyment of learning within families, classrooms, and/or out-of-school environments; (e.g., parks, pediatrician office, bus stop); use widely available tools to scale joyful learning experiences.

3. Methods and measurement development. Examples: AI-based methods development for assessing joyful learning; multimodal diary or interview protocols to use with educators known for their capacity to inspire learning; an industry collaboration to define metrics of enjoyment based on participation in online learning.

We are especially interested in projects that: 

• Take into consideration the perspectives, needs, and lived experiences of non-dominant learners (due to SES, immigration status, language, race, ethnicity, gender) through participatory co-design methods, etc.);
• Demonstrate a whole-child, whole-family, whole-learning ecology perspective;
• Leverage or explore emerging technologies;
• Comprise teams that bring together diverse disciplines, sectors, and/or perspectives (e.g., partnerships with industry, non-profits, or other cultural/community institutions);
• Innovate new methods, drawing on, for instance, large-scale data sets, historical and biographical methods, observational community-based qualitative investigations, and/or experimental approaches; and/or
• Contribute ideas for bringing joyful learning to scale