Introduction

There is a wide variety of wonderful projects described in the Models section of this book. However, as the authors of those projects will tell you, successful curriculum development in mathematics for biology requires more than an exciting course built on sound pedagogical ideas. An academic system based on standard courses distributed among standard departments is resistant to innovation and interdisciplinary teaching. The enthusiasm that accompanies new pedagogical ideas are often dampened by difficulties encountered in the implementation. In the hope of encouraging readers who are interested in emulating the projects in this volume or developing different ones, our goal in this section is to focus on the processes of creating, implementing, and institutionalizing undergraduate mathematics curricula for life science students. The authors have described the strategies and approaches they have used in pursuit of the goals of serving students and institutionalizing courses, highlighting unique features of their particular situation, constraints that affected their project, special support or collaboration they enjoyed, and their suggestions for others interested in pursuing similar projects and recommendations for the future. Not all of the authors are able to report successes, but all of them have thought carefully about why their projects did or did not work. The papers represent a broad spectrum in almost every category-type and size of institution; background and level of student population; curricular level; and size, scope and age of project.