English for Vocation

Vocational Education is at the heart of YouthBuild's mission — beyond preparing students for graduation, we lay the groundwork for future careers.  To help students see the importance of writing in everyday life, these English for Vocation courses will show students the norms of communication in their chosen career fields.

The Healthcare English course will focus on how rhetoric and narrative can affect communications between healthcare workers, patients, and the public at large.  This course will focus on the following areas:

• Rhetoric and Public Health: Considerations of how individuals and organizations present information about human health to the public at large.  Some examples of this include COVID-19 messaging, perceptions of vaccine safety, and raising money for cancer research.

• Medical Narratives: A look at how physicians, nurses, patients, and family members describe their personal experiences with illness and treatment.  Good examples of this are Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe by Katrina Firlik, and A Not Entirely Benign Procedure by Perri Klass.

• Medical Records, Privacy, and Legal Documentation: From charting to HIPAA to malpractice suits,  controlled access to accurate documentation is crucial in medicine.  Here, we discuss how medical information is recorded, tracked, and shared — and how this impacts patient care.

The Construction English course will focus on issues that affect communication in the construction industry:

• Rhetoric and Urban Planning: Here, we look at how people describe cities and urban revitalization.  Questions of what to build and whom to serve are important questions for citizens and local government, and the ways people communicate these needs can drastically impact how people perceive the economy, the housing market, and infrastructure needs.

• American Construction Narratives: The United States is known as "the land of opportunity," and much of that perception is build in the steel and masonry of our buildings and infrastructure.  In this section, we'll look at descriptions of the history of construction in America from multiple perspectives, particularly the first-person stories by construction workers, urban residents, government planners, and policy makers.

• Building from Blueprints: From architectural drawings to building permits, documentation is a key part of planning construction projects.  In this section, we'll consider urban planning diagrams, architectural layouts, and the varieties of required legal documentation.

In this age of information and social media, the ability to communicate effectively is crucial.  In this course, we'll be looking at both how people communicate online and what people say about online communication:

• Perceptions of Digital Technologies: Facebook, Windows, Google, and other digital platforms have revolutionized the exchange of information, but some feel that these technologies have negatively impacted interpersonal connections and attention span.  We'll consider how people describe the pros and cons of these technologies.

• Algorithms, Attention, and Personalized Mass Marketing: From targeted ads to search engine results, the information we see online is sorted by automated programs.  We'll talk about how these algorithms guide relevent information to users and how this also fosters increasing social divides in the perception of reality.  We'll focus on the concepts of filter bubbles, confirmation bias, and the rhetorical nature of reality.

• Content Creation: For this component, students will develop their own social media campaigns, and then describe how they chose their individual approaches toward engaging with audiences through digital means.

• Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: New technologies are able to imitate human work in writing and art, and there's serious debate about the role these technologies should play in classrooms, workplaces, and society at large.