January/February 2005 | Home

Literacy Project Update: Technical Writing Outreach Meets CAHSEE in Oakland

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.

Return to the Media Academy

The Technical Literacy Project continued its skill-building work with underperforming Oakland high-school students this fall.

From October 6 through November 3, 2004, I conducted five pairs of weekly hour-long workshops on writing effective technical descriptions at Media Academy High School, one of five small schools that have divided the staff and real estate of Oakland’s former Fremont High School (High Street at Foothill Blvd.). This is the project’s sixth year working with Media Academy students. By the end of this cycle, we had totaled just over 2,000 student-hours of in-class literacy development.

The CAHSEE Challenge

The 50 multi-ethnic grade-11 students (in two classes) who participated this year were (mostly) the same students who had studied instruction writing with the project in the fall of 2003, as sophomores, before campus violence prevented the usual spring follow-up. The Media Academy is officially one of the Bay Area’s five lowest Academic Performance Index schools (399, down from 444 last year). Only 40% of students there who tried the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) last spring passed.

Technical writing tools and techniques are just what such students need. School district analysis of their CAHSEE attempts revealed that of the half dozen skill areas covered on the language arts part of the test, “writing strategies and conventions” was where they performed the worst. The Media Academy thematically uses “writing for a larger audience” (mostly journalism) to address this weakness. Our technical writing workshops focus here even more, with

• overt guidelines (on posters and handouts) that spell out basic text-organizing, content-delivery, and audience-support techniques,
• description rebuilding exercises that also promote underlying cognitive development (thinking more critically and abstractly about text), and
• direct encouragement for students to revise their own drafts (on both homework and tests) to find and improve their own weak spots.

The next CAHSEE offering fell on November 11, just one week after our last fall session. About 80% of this test involves reading and writing nonfiction (popular science), non-narrative prose. So I stressed the relevance of technical writing techniques to qualifying for a high-school diploma, as well as to success in life after school, in every workshop session.

Adventures in History

Each year brings new adventures when teaching at the Media Academy. The bell schedule always defies logic. The door hardware was thicker than ever before, the better to quell thefts. And school director Michael Jackson was hosting U.S. history (not language arts) classes. So I adapted the project's basic examples to fit into a history-of-American-technology framework. For instance, as we exercised description-writing techniques we also explored accounts of

• Benjamin Franklin’s 1748 electrostatic motor (whose description survived for 250 years in a personal letter),
• Thomas Edison’s 1877 first phonograph (surprisingly, a precursor of the compact disk), and even
• the invention of Post-It notes in Minnesota in 1980 (just a few years before these students were born).

You Can Contribute

If you are interested in literacy outreach, please contact T. R. Girill to explore ways that you can contribute to this ongoing project.

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