Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
May/June 2004

Chapter Activity: An Outreach Theme with Five Variations

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.

The East Bay Chapter's literacy outreach project (jointly sponsored through a time commitment by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) unfolded with new variations this spring, continuing an expansion begun last fall. During the fall 2003 school term, we fielded technical writing sessions in multiple English classes hosted by two teachers new to the project (Deborah Wilson and Christian Rideout) at Oakland's Media Academy High School. Unfortunately, unexpected levels of campus violence prevented carrying that work into 2004. But three other teachers in the Livermore school district specifically asked to try technical writing for the first time this spring, yielding new variations on the project theme.

Literacy at Livermore

From January 21 through February 17, 2004, I presented 1.5–hour weekly workshops on instructions and descriptions for the developmentally disabled class at Livermore High School, enthusiastically hosted by special education teachers Carolyn Heath and Patti Vanarsdall. These sessions gave the students an enriched view of work-world life and showed them the importance of effective nonfiction reading and writing outside the classroom.

The challenge in these lessons was adaptability: to see if the literacy project's past strategies and materials, tuned for under-performing urban grade 10 students, would adapt well to the needs of this suburban but developmentally disabled audience. The answer is "yes." To successfully customize for this class, I did the following:

• Introduced all the analytic activities with extra physical examples and exhibits (thus we edited recipes amid the actual fruits and vegetables that they mentioned).
• Emphasized prewriting exercises (such as finding, marking, counting, and labeling text features) to build genuine cognitive skills without presupposing handwriting or spelling abilities that some of these students lacked.
• Altered the scope, pace, and vocabulary of some material (such as the pieces out of which we rebuilt big technical descriptions) to better suit the longer class sessions but shorter attention spans of this group.

The Granada Variations

Meanwhile, at Granada High School, also in Livermore, English teacher Judy Bailey volunteered to add technical writing to her grade 11 lessons for the first time. We met twice to negotiate a blend of basic technical writing and "traditional" English topics (drafting abstracts, plagiarism) with which she was comfortable. Five differently customized Granada workshops began on March 25 and continued well past the deadline for this article (ending late in April).

The focus at Granada was less on developing writing skills than on promoting writing responsibility. The students met and tried new techniques to be sure. They even piloted exercises originally planned for the Media Academy biology class. But because they came better prepared, they could more directly appreciate usability as a writing goal, and we discussed the many implications of this goal during each class.

An Invitation

Each of the five high-school teachers who newly experimented with literacy building through technical writing this year brought unique interests and concerns to the project. And in each case, a rewarding new variation of literacy outreach emerged.

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

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