Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
May/June 2003

Acting Locally, Thinking Globally in Literacy Outreach Project

by T. R. Girill
East Bay Chapter, 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.

Overview

From January to the end of April, 2003, long after the deadline for this article, EBSTC (and cosponsor Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) continued our technical literacy outreach project with weekly technical writing workshops for all grade-10 students at Maynard Communication High School (one of the "new small schools" into which Oakland's old, underperforming Fremont High School is splitting). Because the participating English classes occurred in the first and last period of each school day this year, separate visits were needed to cover each one. Hence, the total number of trips to the campus doubled from 2001–2002.

Acting Locally

One side effect of these extra visits was that I could clearly see the influence of the newly required California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) on curricular themes. CAHSEE's 90% emphasis on nonfiction prose has the Maynard English classes busy reading Fast Food Nation, studying the World Almanac, and drafting business letters to the school district (about classroom inadequacies). Technical writing complements and reinforces this new focus beautifully; teacher Michael Jackson pointed out to the students that every technique featured on our poster of description-writing guidelines was also tested on one or more CAHSEE questions. With more (and more frequent) classroom experience, I have tuned several exercises to give the students more active participation sooner in the treatment of each topic (especially students whose weak basic skills might otherwise prevent their participation at all).

Yet another side effect of the added visits was growing mutual respect. Michael twice this term has allowed the workshops to continue on days when he was absent himself, so that only a slightly amazed substitute teacher was available to assist. And on February 27, in a touching sign of current confidence as well as anticipated future collaboration, he gave me my own gate key for the 10-foot-high chain-link fence that encircles the campus and separates it from its Fruitvale neighborhood.

Thinking Globally

We now not only have a well-developed set of technical-writing exercises in play in an Oakland school, but we share them with any interested teacher or parent worldwide through the EBSTC technical literacy web pages.

Links from elsewhere to this site reveal its growing influence. Among the most interesting are:

• University of Washington's EServer Tech Comm Library, with over 3200 cataloged educational resources in technical communication, where users rate our instruction-writing exercises as "great" (averaging 4 out of 5 stars).
• California Department of Education's list of Educational Support Resources Outside CDE, where we are one of 26 featured online resources.
• The new international STC Secondary Education Outreach Committee web site, where we are one of only three featured projects.
• Web site of Newington High School 3000 miles away in Connecticut, where our exercises are one of 11 featured sites on "Reading and Writing in the Content Areas" to help local teachers.

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Acting Locally, Thinking Globally in Literacy Outreach Project