Engaging America’s Talent Conference
March 22 – 24, 2010
Peabody Hotel, Little Rock, AR
To register, click here (coming soon!)
For a list of workshops, click here.
For the conference agenda, click here.
More on the Conference
The Arkansas ASSET Initiative, a program of the Arkansas Science & Technology Authority and the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research will partner with the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to host a national educational outreach conference. Following the conference, Authority EPSCoR staff, working with NSF and EPSCoR Education Directors from across the US, will maintain a continuing electronic dialogue on successful education models for specific STEM fields, populations, geographic regions or niches.
The conference will bring together educational coordinators and other leadership personnel from EPSCoR jurisdictions and other national leaders from exemplary programs to share information related to successful educational outreach models occurring across the United States. Objectives of the conference include increasing collaborations among the states related to STEM educational efforts and exploring ways to develop a well-prepared, STEM-enabled workforce. The goal of the meeting is to share educational models that have been exceptionally successful in order to stimulate creative thought and development of, or even simply enhancement of, educational outreach programs that will address the unique needs of the diverse regions.
Enhancing diversity and measuring success of outreach programs are also important issues to the EPSCoR program. Speakers will weave this into their presentation and include in the discussion following each presentation.
While past workshops may have presented data on educational outreach as components of thematic science workshops, this workshop/conference offers the opportunity to examine the common characteristics of successful educational outreach programs and to indentify also the unique special characteristics that make them especially suited to the particular region, talent pool, or special needs of the community.
Tables of participants attending the conference will interact following each of the thematic sessions, and, working as teams, will determine the key characteristics will be shared electronically as the teams work online to publically and visually share these ideas and comments during the session.
Each presenter will also receive questions posted online that may evolve during the discussion at various tables or that may not have been addressed following the presentation brief Q&A. These comments and questions will initiate an “online on-going discussion” that will be maintained during and following the conference. This information will be public at the workshop website.
