A person with

·        A good work ethic – a person, who has a good personality, is an independent worker, a team member, responsible, and dependable (Meyer 90);

·        High self-esteem and motivation, leadership skills, effective work habits, and a knack for learning and adapting to change (Meyer 91-92);

·        Oral, negotiation, and teamwork skills – listen, respond to both content and feeling in other people’s words, negotiate and compromise, and participate in group discussion (Meyer 92).

·        Adaptive reading and writing skills – reading strategies that rely on navigating, searching, skimming, and filtering large pools of information (Meyer 94).

·        Ability to write effective memos, short reports, and briefing paper of one or few pages; write quick overviews, clear instructions, and careful notes; and reshape information instead of producing it from scratch (Meyer 94).

·        Computer skills – informational, systematical, and technological (see bulleted list on page 95).

 

 

Workplace Literacy

·        Focused on by the Depts. of Labor and Education, who attempts to “nail down exactly what skills are essential for successful entry into the workplace” (86).

·        Includes not only the traditionally defined literacies – reading, writing, and math – but also computer skills, oral communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and effective interpersonal communication (86).

·        Believes students, graduates, and businesses should have certain objectives/goals (see Fig. 6.3 on page 89).

 

Responsibilities of Teachers of Tech. Communication (?)

·        Assess and evaluate curriculum according to workplace demands.

·        Incorporate activities/assignments that get students actively involved in projects and writings that would be done in a typical workplace - ones that combine both oral and written forms of communication.

 

Questions

·        Are Meyer and Bernhardt suggesting a more vocational type of classroom versus an academic one?  Etiquette classes versus writing classes?

·        What to teach students?  => Where are the boundary lines drawn?  [writing, negotiating, communicating, cooperating, etc.]

·        Meyer and Bernhardt “call for change” but don’t offer solutions…do we have the answers?  If so, what are they?