Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
September/October 2004| Home

Literacy Project Update: Sharing Outreach More Effectively with Teachers

by T. R. Girill
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.

Web Site Enhanced

During the summer break from school classes, the EBSTC literacy outreach project focused on sharing grade-appropriate technical writing exercises and strategy suggestions with schoolteachers through the chapter web site. Annotated exercises for learning both instructions and descriptions have been freely available on the project’s branch of the EBSTC site since 2001. This summer we added two features to make those shared exercises easier for teachers to find and use.

Three Indexes

Besides the descriptive table of contents that introduces (and links to) each set of exercises, the site now offers three interactive topical indexes to this instructional material:

• An (alphabetical) index by thematic task addressed. From art through iterative text revision to risk management, the exercises are listed by and linked from the (main) aspect(s) of technical writing that they explore.
• California reading standards supported. A brief summary of each state content standard appears in grade order (3 through 12), followed by links to the project exercises most relevant to that standard.
• California writing standards supported. Here too, teachers can jump from (summaries of) the graded standard that interests them to the shared exercises that most directly support it.

Because teachers plan their lessons with these content standards (and thematic tasks) in mind, the three new indexes should help them quickly find the most relevant parts of our shared cases and examples.

Concerns Addressed

Discovering external links to our technical writing material (sometimes to the project home page; sometimes to specific exercises) from other reputable educational sites is always satisfying. (For example, we are one of only 14 “additional resources” recommended by the Alameda County Office of Education on their "Web Sites for Administrators" page.) Sometimes, however, as with the “Teacher Resources” list on the staff web site for Dorsey High School (Los Angeles County), our link wrongly implies that technical writing is (merely) vocational training. While most professional writers recognize this as a misconception, most high-school teachers do not. So this summer we added an explicit analysis of “Frequently Asked Questions About the Benefits of Technical Writing in High School” to the set of literacy background papers posted on the site.

The 16 questions addressed in this 10-page FAQ essay reflect the most common and most pressing concerns that schoolteachers have expressed (sometimes personally, sometimes by e-mail) when they consider trying technical writing with their students. One big fear (noted above) is narrow vocationalism. So the FAQ spells out how, despite its name, technical writing really promotes liberal education by broadening (not restricting) student skills, by promoting self-awareness and intellectual rigor, and by alerting students to the social impact of what (and how) they write.

Other questions explored here include:

• Do technical writing skills have any “authentic,” real-world value (the very opposite of the vocationalism worry)?
• Is there a gender-neutral way to introduce technical writing?
• Can technical writing lessons adapt to meet the different literacy needs of such diverse groups as students who are college-bound and those who are developmentally challenged?

(In each case the answer is “yes.”) If you already have thoughtful (or just strong!) opinions on such questions, please read the FAQ essay and send me your comments. This is a work in progress, evolving in light of writer and teacher feedback. Overtly addressing these questions about technical writing’s role in high school will not help teachers find useful exercises (unlike the three new topical indexes), but it will help them better appreciate what they find.

Volunteer

The literacy outreach project always welcomes new contributors; contact T. R. Girill for information.

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