Introducing Science Teacher-Interns to Technical Writing

by T.R. Girill
STC Fellow

T. R. currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project.

The Program

This summer (2008), three sets of science teachers, while pursuing hands-on internships, encountered technical writing on their way to other adventures. That's not what most of them planned, but almost always they found this surprise encounter interesting, revealing, and useful. Best of all, what they learned about technical writing returned with them to their classrooms in the fall.

ETEC Level 3

The Edward Teller Education Center (ETEC, etec.ucdavis.edu), under the leadership of Carey Kopay, offers California public school teachers four levels of science-oriented professional development. ETEC packages this service as topical academies, which begin with two-day workshops and grow in length and depth into summer-long internships with working scientists. ETEC's Level 3 workshop, which occurs in mid-July each year, brings interested science teachers (19 in 2008, most from central California high schools) together for a week at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Besides tips from master teachers, tours, and job scheduling, which the teachers expect, they also get two 90-minute sessions on technical writing, which most do not expect.

Their first session focuses pedagogically, on technical writing in the science class. After a quick review of text usability principles, I share the technical literacy project's classroom-tested strategies, guidelines, and exercises for building the student skills needed to create effective instructions and descriptions. Pointing out the empirical evidence for these usability techniques as well as the engineering character of good text design helps these teachers integrate nonfiction-writing activities into their science (not language arts) classes.

The second ETEC Level-3 technical writing session applies the same principles to each teacher's more personal publishing goals: writing science articles, drafting white papers, and planning grant proposals. On their post-workshop evaluation forms, the level-3 teacher-interns often commented on the helpfulness of these technical writing sessions, rating them 4.5 (out of 5) for "effectiveness."

ETEC Level 4

Teachers who have worked their way through the first three levels of ETEC academies, usually over several years, can be eligible for a paid 6-week internship with an LLNL mentor who does research in the area (for example, biology or physics) in which they teach. Few have pursued this internship in the past, but in 2008, 15 science teachers enrolled in ETEC's Level 4 session. Here, not only their laboratory work but also their technical writing activities can build upon their level-3 session background.

To quickly introduce each intern to their mentor's role as a scientist-author, I gave each one a recent technical article that their individual mentor had written. We then looked at how to use commercial tools (such as Web of Knowledge) and similar freeware (such as OCLC's WorldCat, www.worldcat.org, and Google Scholar, www.scholar.google.com) to explore that article's intellectual impact.

Throughout their summer with a researcher "in the wild," they received weekly e-mails about classroom-tested technical writing activities beyond level 3 that they could borrow or adapt for their own students. Then, late in July, I coached them on the design of effective science posters (an internship deliverable). Here again, they applied to a new situation the same good-description guidelines and usability principles now familiar from their earlier technical communication work. All of these level-4 enrichments were ETEC firsts in 2008.

CSU Pre-Service Interns

Separate from these working (in-service) teachers were a group of eight pre-service California State University undergraduates (from various campuses) at LLNL to prepare for future public-school teaching careers. They also had a poster requirement and a surprise encounter with technical writing. Posters, like technical talks, are too often handled as isolated do-or-die assignments in science classes, with their skill-building potential wasted.

On July 21, however, the pre-service interns received their own compressed introduction to the same basic usability issues that the ETEC Level-3 teachers had explored at greater length. Like their in-service colleagues, the interns saw poster planning in its larger context, as yet another problem of effective technical communication, one that just happens to have very unusual constraints.

Two Common Themes

Helping these current and future science teachers to build the technical writing skills of their students-skills appropriate across the spectrum of science careers-is always satisfying. This year two unifying themes emerged during these discussions.

One involved applied science: effective text-design techniques grow out of decades of empirical (psychological and linguistic) research applied to the engineering problem of building text that meets reader needs (an unexpected insight for most science teachers).

The other involved responsibility: science teachers may be the only people who both recognize that their students need nonnarrative nonfiction writing skills and have the right technical background to do something about it.

An Invitation

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 (trgirill@acm.org).