Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
September/October 2002

Chapter Activities:
EBSTC Community Outreach Update

by T. R. Girill
STC Fellow

Passing the Baton

Five years ago Lenore P. Weiss imagined EBSTC’s community outreach involvement in the Oakland public schools, and then she made it happen. She talked to Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) administrators and teachers, and over several years at several schools she patiently coaxed a good idea into actual classroom visits and technical writing lessons. In fact, her success at Montera Middle School led to an invitation for her to serve as Montera’s volunteer technical support resource for the school’s whole parent/teacher community, starting this fall. But that exciting role (plus her “real work” at AC Transit) doesn’t leave much time to chair the EBSTC outreach effort. So the baton has passed to me as her co-conspirator in outreach to the Oakland schools for the last three years.

Web-Shared Materials

Our technical writing workshops at Montera Middle School and at Oakland’s Fremont High School have gradually yielded grade-appropriate technical writing examples and exercises that are hard to find (and expensive to buy) commercially. So the EBSTC outreach project began freely sharing its teaching materials on the chapter web site two years ago. Each year we have expanded these shared resources for interested teachers (or parents). In May, we added a background study that explains how our approach promotes general cognitive maturity along with specific writing skills (Example Elaboration as a Neglected Instructional Strategy). This September the set of posted exercises will almost double as our description-writing cases join the instruction-writing cases published on the web site last year. Take a look at the East Bay Technical Literacy Project to see what our chapter now shares with anyone interested in technical writing in urban public schools.

The Maynard School Collaboration

One focus of EBSTC’s outreach project has been the “Media Academy,” a journalism-themed cluster of related classes that encourages students at Oakland’s Fremont High School to see the real-world relevance of developing their basic reading and writing skills. Each semester last year, for example, I threaded six-week technical writing workshops into four grade-10 English classes under the auspices of Media Academy director Michael Jackson. This summer OUSD finally approved the (very gradual) transformation of the Media Academy into a “new autonomous small school” (still at the Fremont site), the Robert C. Maynard Communication High School. Teachers are now scrambling to simultaneously launch the new school and maintain the old one. Technical writing will contribute strongly to the academic success of the Maynard School, but the details will only unfold along with the fall school term. Any chapter member interested in helping with this adventure can contact me at trg@llnl.gov.

The Grice Committee

In June, STC Fellow Roger Grice became the first national STC “Assistant to the President (AP) for Outreach.” He immediately enlisted a committee, which he asked me to join, to work with him to make community outreach more prominent among national STC activities, and to coordinate individual chapter outreach projects. This new high-profile AP role is very encouraging for those of us in STC looking for ways to apply technical communication to the educational and related development problems of our local communities. I’ll share with you the work of Grice’s committee as its plans come into focus during the year ahead.

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