The biggest challenge that we faced during this project was the lack of funding to develop the national dissemination of TWO DIFFERENT outreach projects. In hindsight, we should have focused on only one of the two projects. This under-funding issue was especially problematic for our SMART Team project. One of the lessons learned in this project was just how difficult it was for us to explain the different features of our SMART Team program to our partners ¿ and to provide sufficient training for them to easily implement the program. Our continuing efforts to disseminate this program will focus on a small number of sites for which we can provide significant hands-on training of our partners.
A second challenge encountered during our efforts to disseminate our SMART Team modeling program was the fact that we were asking outreach programs at research institutions to ¿adopt or adapt¿ OUR PROGRAM ¿ and to add it to their already busy outreach program. Without sufficient funding to pay for staff time required to run this time-intensive modeling program, it was difficult for our partners to fully commit to the program. As all outreach programs struggle to maintain funding for their own programs, it is difficult for them to maintain an interest in adding a new program (SMART teams) to their existing programs.
As a solution to this problem, we plan to explore the dissemination of this SMART Team modeling program by working with bioscience educators at small liberal arts colleges. We are increasingly encountering undergraduate educators who are interested in establishing a high school outreach program. These educators are more able to focus the attention needed to develop this program than their colleagues at research institutions. In addition, a small liberal arts college is more apt to support the outreach efforts of their faculty ¿ as they see this as a recruitment effort for their institution.
