Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
September/October 2003

How Literacy Outreach Spent Summer Vacation

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

As you might expect from an education program, EBSTC’s literacy outreach project spent summer vacation on self-improvement. We co-hosted a student field trip, expanded the shared exercises on the chapter web site, and posted another background essay as well.

Student Field Trip

On June 2, 40 grade-10 students from Oakland’s Fremont High School, along with one English and one science teacher, took a day-long field trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), about 40 miles from their campus. These represented about two-thirds of the Media Academy (formerly called Maynard School) students whom I had taught about writing technical instructions and descriptions during the 2002–2003 school year. The goal of the trip was to reinforce what the students had learned in class and to encourage them to stay in school and learn more.

The focal point of the visit was LLNL’s Discovery Center, an exhibit area that explains lab projects to the public. To make the tour more relevant to the background of these students, I asked all the presenters to offer a "behind the scenes" look at how posters were planned and exhibits designed to communicate science and engineering more effectively. Also included was an hour-long "Fun with Science" session, an on-site version of LLNL’s interactive demonstration of basic science principles that tours local grade schools.

The day was an adventure for the staff as well as for the visiting students. The Discovery Center is aimed at grade 5, and this was everyone’s first attempt to present the material to high-school students (another reason for the "behind the scenes" spin). Also, the normal group size is about 20 (because of room capacity), so this was the first time that we tried parallel Discovery Center and Fun with Science sessions each for half of the guests, then switched halves and repeated both presentations. A bag lunch on the nearby shaded patio, where students talked personally with the presenters, rounded out the visit.

In general, the students were interested, the teachers were enthused, and we met our educational and motivational goals. A montage featuring photographic highlights of this field trip is available at www.llnl.gov/icc/OaklandStudents.

More Shared Material

During the 2002–2003 school year the Media Academy teachers experimented with using journalist Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction Fast Food Nation in English and science class at the same time. The literacy project developed a long, customized instruction-building exercise to support this cross-curriculum experiment (called "fact checking on the Internet," described in last December’s Devil Mountain Views). Plain and annotated versions of that material now appear on our literacy outreach web pages for any interested teacher to review or borrow. We also refreshed the project home page to reflect our work’s current focus and to better introduce our full supply of sharable lessons and examples. And last spring’s STC Science Communication SIG essay on "Confronting Illiteracy with Scientific Communication" is now linked from the project resources page, its natural and appropriate home.

Any EBSTC member interested in helping work on literacy outreach during the coming school year is encouraged to contact T. R. Girill.

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