Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2003
Chapter Activities:
EBSTC Outreach Helps Launch a New School
by T. R. Girill
STC Fellow
T. R. Girill currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy project. For more details about this initiative, check the EBSTC web site.
For six consecutive Wednesdays from October 23 through November 27, I continued the ongoing EBSTC technical literacy outreach project by conducting instruction-writing workshops in the grade 10 English class of teacher Michael Jackson at Oakland’s Fremont High School (FHS).
Because of its persistently poor scores on California’s standardized tests, FHS began this year the state-mandated process of decomposing from a 2000-student comprehensive high school into at least five “new small autonomous interconnected schools,” each with a specific career theme. Thus the 32 students that I worked with are really the very first class of a new media-themed school called the [Robert C.] Maynard Communication High School. As always at FHS, this was an ethnically diverse group of boys and girls struggling to bring both their social and cognitive skills up to grade level after years of neglect.
The new school (housed in the same overcrowded, windowless, portable classrooms as the old school, of course) aims to give its students the focused, consistent setting they need to regain their lost ground. I felt encouraged to see more:
- cooperation among teachers (such as English and science),
- coordination among subjects (even language arts and biology), and
- lessons based on nonfiction prose related to work life (see Fact Checking on the Internet on this page).
I tried to support these positive trends throughout my 6-week instruction-writing workshops. Most sessions involved previously tested exercises with kitchen recipes (all posted with commentary on the Technical Literacy Project's Instruction-Writing Exercises page). This fall I rearranged the material, however, to make room for a new, two-part exercise that I developed especially for these Maynard School students.
Fact Checking on the Internet
The added exercise, called “Fact Checking on the Internet,” benefits the students in five related ways at once:
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It integrates smoothly with and reinforces the big nonfiction reading project that spanned their English and science class for the first time this year (Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a journalistic critique of chain restaurants and meat packing). Here, students refine draft instructions for checking four claims in Schlosser’s book.
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It offers students practice applying their instruction-writing guidelines and troubleshooting techniques to a personal yet scaled-up, real-world situation, without the scaffolding that helped train them in the other exercises.
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It introduces a pair of authoritative, well-engineered Internet sites that provide the students with online information useful far beyond this specific project, for school and for life (Librarians' Index to the Internet and The Infopeople Project, both maintained by the California State Library).
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It exposes students to material that resembles (in size, content, style, complexity, and even presentation) the series of one-page nonfiction essays that make up almost all of the newly required California High School Exit Exam (which they must now take every year until they pass).
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It promotes their much-needed sense of personal responsibility for and critical analysis of everything that they read.
Suggestions Needed
This outreach project continues during the spring of
2003, when the same students focus on writing descriptions (as in past
years). Since biology is the science for grade 10, I encourage any interested
STC members, especially those with a background in biology or medical
writing, to contact me with suggestions
for other exercises that we can tailor to the special interdisciplinary
needs of these “new school” students.
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