Technical Writing Returns to Oakland's Media Academy

by T.R.Girill
STC Fellow

During the 2006-2007 academic year, the EBSTC/LLNL literacy outreach project returned to Oakland's Media Academy High School for the seventh
time since our first collaboration in 1999. (Indeed, academic director Michael Jackson greeted me at the locked fence with news that he had become a first-time grandfather just that day.) The 400-student Media Academy is one of four (remaining) public schools into which the former Fremont High School has split in an attempt to improve its chronically substandard performance. With new paint and repairs, the High Street campus looked better than it has in years. But the ethnically diverse Media Academy still ranks in the bottom 10% of all California schools on state achievement tests.

This year biology teacher Sunny Chan hosted our technical writing workshops in his grade-11 physiology class each Friday. Many of the 31 students that started in October write (and read) far below grade level, are cognitively (and socially) immature, and see little connection between their school assignments and later real-world jobs. So our prime goals were to explicitly build their weak nonfiction writing skills while showing them the relevance of those skills to their future roles as effective employees, parents, and citizens.

Some students struggled with English as their second language. Others remained aggressively disruptive; vandalism and even theft of project resources are just part of Media Academy life. The drop-out challenge was also relentless. By the last workshop session late in February, at least eight of the original students had dropped out of high school.

Our workshop activities draw mostly on the supply of well-honed instruction-writing and description-writing. exercises publicly shared on our project web pages. Every one is clearly linked to the California Language Arts content standards that it supports. But I also try to customize the sessions to the context and needs of each participating class. Since this year's home was a biology classroom, these were among the adaptations that I included:

• We analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of simple instructions with which students could extract their own DNA from their cheek cells. This is an increasingly common high-school introduction to human genetics.
• We interactively verified the steps for using Librarian's Internet Index to check popular claims about E. coli contamination in fast food.
• We explored good-description techniques by working through the clever design features, structure, and helpful scaffolding built into the CDC's 6-page model form for reliably reporting "sudden unexplained infant deaths."
• We compared good and bad text, figures, and headings in alternative versions of a recent explanation of how old human bones fracture.

To learn more about the literacy outreach project, to suggest a teacher who might want to host future technical writing workshops for their classes, or to participate yourself, please contact T.R. Girill (trg@llnl.gov).