LOWERING BARRIERS TO PILOTING THE CLASSROOM PRACTICE OF SEM OR ELECTRON MICROPROBE USAGE: CONNECTING WITH NEW FACULTY PARTICIPANTS THROUGH THEIR STUDENTS

Any logistical challenge, no matter how minor, can become a significant barrier to dissemination of a promising educational strategy, as making changes in classroom practice takes time and affords some risk of failure or difficulty. This is particularly true of strategies involving analytical instrumentation use in the classroom, as setting these up involves becoming familiar with the instrumentation as well as making potentially substantial and risky changes in classroom exercises. In four years of a CCLI funded pilot effort led by the senior author, presenting instrument usage strategies for the classroom using remotely operable microbeam instrumentation through workshops and other presentation venues, no faculty at other institutions chose to adopt these approaches, despite considerable anecdotal evidence from attendees for interest in these strategies.

In our NSF-TUES Type 2 project, we have tried to facilitate adoption of SEM- and EPMA-based classroom strategies through the "carrot" of free instrument time for faculty to trial-run activities and become familiar with the FCAEM remotely-operable instruments, along with tutorial videos and "packaged" laboratory sample suites for faculty use. None of these addresses the obstacle of connecting with the faculty most likely to consider adoption. Toward that end, we piloted a different kind of outreach strategy at a recent GSA Southeastern Section meeting: we secured exhibit hall space, monitors, and Internet access, and set both the FCAEM EPMA and SEM up for live operation. Over the course of the 1.5 days of exhibit time, 60+ meeting attendees sat down with one of our team for a demonstration and the opportunity to run an instrument in real time - we were basically mobbed for the entire meeting. Most of the interested attendees were undergraduate students , some of whom were presenting at the meeting, though others were simply attending. Their intense interest in our demos drew the attention of their faculty mentors, who we engaged for more intensive hands-on demonstrations and discussions about the instrumentation and its potential classroom use. We have since been in contact with many of these faculty about our "carrot" of mentored instrument time, and several are now taking us up on the offer.