Dale Hubert on The Flat Stanley Project

Image: the Flat Stanley project

Yesterday, I talked to the founder of the Flat Stanley Project, Dale Hubert, over the phone. Dale is a Canadian Grade 3 teacher who started the project back in 1995. Since then, the project has grown and is being used in schools all over the world.

Among other things, I asked Dale what he thinks made the Flat Stanley Project so popular, and a fairly long list of possible reasons. Flat Stanley...

• creates a (global) community - he is a mutual friend that you can communicate "through"
• makes abstract remote communication more graspable
• makes ordinary writing tasks more meaningful
• enables outcome-based education: strong incentives (e.g. honor to be Flat Stanley's host)
  
• adds a level of imagination
  
• generates global experiences
• enables proxy-traveling
  
• makes it easier to discuss sensitive topics like obesity or abuse since you communicate via Flat Stanley (Flat Stanley needs to lose weight...)
• can be used to teach children about traveling both in space (geography) and time (history).
  

Dale Hubert would like to see Flat Stanley being used more in hospitals, in order to comfort children who are too ill to leave their beds. Flat Stanley could, for example, be used as their physical travel-proxy who send home postcards from different cities and countries.