Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2004

Chapter Activities: Autumn Literacy Outreach Update

by T. R. Girill
STC Fellow, East Bay Chapter

T. R. Girill currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project. For more details about this initiative, check the EBSTC web site.

From October 16th through November 20th, 2003, EBSTC and the Computation Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory continued their jointly sponsored literacy outreach project. On every Thursday, basic technical writing techniques were introduced to a new class of grade 10 students at Oakland’s Fremont High School (FHS). Fremont’s schoolwide Academic Performance Index (API) for October 2003 was 439, a discouraging 45 points lower than the previous year and well below the “similar schools median” API of 541.

Classroom Adventures

This fall saw our most ambitious start in the literacy program’s five-year run. Fifty five minute technical writing classes were offered to over 110 students. The students were split across four classes. Six lessons were offered on a weekly basis. Once again, I used the customized, instruction-writing guidelines and exercises developed for underperforming students in the previous years. These guidelines included links to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

Because of persistent poor API and low performance in state tests, FHS is gradually splitting into half a dozen “coordinated, small, autonomous schools” with separate principals, teachers, and even separate plots of campus real estate. The Media Academy High School, where I teach, now owns portable classrooms that clog the parking lot.

Each of these small schools has also inherited its share of grief in the form of severe staff shortage, class sizes up from about 22 last year to 30 this year, and chronic violence.

Halfway through the fall session, one of the two teachers with whom I was working asked me to cancel further lessons. It seems that although we were well past the semester midpoint, new students continually arrived in her class “directly after release from county jail” (in her words). These new arrivals regularly provoked classroom fights. Nothing happened while I was present, but this mature teaching veteran feared that she could not maintain order given the size and membership of the troublesome classes.

This was the first time that the literacy outreach project had to be curtailed because of violence—a disappointing concession to school needs even more urgent than learning to read and write. Plans to offer descriptive writing classes this spring are not being negotiated either.

The Broader Framework

On the positive side, fall 2003 also offered an unusual chance to discuss the framework of this project with a multidisciplinary group of interested professionals. From October 12th to 15th, 2003, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC) held a rare West Coast conference in San Francisco. As part of the SIGDOC technical sessions, I presented a 2-hour workshop on “Documentation as Problem Solving for K-12 Literacy Programs” (introduced on the conference web site).

The workshop explored the relevance of documentation theory and practice in improving pre-college, nonfiction writing on four levels:

• Providing an “authentic,” professional model besides journalism.
• Providing a broader strategic approach than literature alone.
• Guiding classroom tactical exercises with the psychological, linguistic, and engineering principles of effective text design.
• Confronting persistent literacy pitfalls in new ways.

This session placed the daily work of literacy improvement into a broader intellectual context on which both industry practitioners and academic scholars could comment.

SIGDOC participants from Ireland and Canada added an international perspective to the conference. Attendees were pleasantly surprised by the good fit between grade-school literacy problems and technical-writing responses.

The literacy outreach project always welcomes new contributors; contact T. R. Girill to explore the possibilities.

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