Writing and quantitative literacies workshops for 100Up students - A School Improvement Initiative
The Writing Centre and the Numeracy Centre of ADP ran two two-hour workshops for the participants in the 100UP Grade 12 residential holiday camp programme in July. Academic literacies are vitally important for success at university and often present obstacles to first year students, so it was exciting for ADP staff to have the opportunity to introduce these promising grade 12 learners to the literacy requirements of university study.
For the quantitative literacy workshop, the Numeracy Centre lecturers each took 25 students to a separate venue, so as to ensure more interaction and individual attention. The workshop dealt with the contexts of environmental issues and an exercise in calculating the nutritional content of various popular lunchtime snacks. One lecturer also did an exercise based on the complexities of NSFAS funding. The nutrition exercise was particularly popular with the students, who were getting hungry towards the end of the workshop. The workshop provided a “Cook’s Tour” of quantitative literacy concepts that experience has shown to be perplexing to students. Some examples were percentages that are greater than 100%, negative percentage change, rates (like water resources per person per year) that do not have time in the denominator and measuring quantities of water in terms of cubic measures. The students in general were enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy the activities – one was even overheard to remark that they “far preferred this stuff to doing mathematics”.
Tailored to ensure that the 100Up students build on writing skills learnt in high school, the writing workshop sought to ‘demystify academic writing’ by mapping the connections and the differences that exist between different writing genres. To map the contours of the different writing genres, the students were paired and given a writing prompt that required them to write a text message detailing ‘how they spent a weekend’ to their friends. Thereafter, a conversation ensured in which the presenter and the students teased out the characteristics of the responses they had written. Subsequently, the students were requested to respond to a similar writing prompt. This time, their responses were targeted at their mothers instead of their friends. What followed afterwards was another group conversation to identify the character, as well as the underlying rationale for their responses. In this way, a mundane task such as writing a text message opened the window to a conversation on the different elements that inform writing in general and academic writing in particular. After the workshop, one of the 100up students gave a vote of thanks in which he thanked the presenter for ‘simplifying’ academic writing and making it palatable to young high school students who often find big concepts like academic writing ‘intimidating.’
In the written feedback on the programme, several students picked one of these academic literacies workshops as the “academic adventure that stood out” for them, saying things like “The speaker was very much engaged with us …” and “Learning how to write a certain way was beneficial so that I know what type of writing applies to what situation”.