Quote 'The Bash & (ampersand) is a builtin control operator used to
fork processes. From the Bash man page, "/If a command is terminated by
the control operator &, the shell executes the command in the background
in a subshell/".'

So the first part of your script becomes

#!/bin/sh

# cd to pythonfc and run gedit
cd ~/pythonfc
gedit &

However, I'm not certain whether or not the processes end when the
script ends, so you might want to leave the & off the final gedit.