IRVINE : UCI Writing Director Wins Research Award

The director of a writing program in UC Irvine’s education department has won a statewide award for educational research.

Carol Booth Olson, director of the UCI Writing Project, was selected as the first winner of the 1994 Caddo Gap Press award for education research. Olson was the principal investigator on the “Reading, Thinking and Writing About Culturally Diverse Literature” program, which explored ways to interest adolescents of various ethnicities in academics.

UCI officials said Olson will receive the award, which consists of $250 and publication in the 1994 Yearbook of California Education Research, at the fall conference of the California Council on the Education of Teachers in Irvine on Thursday.

Olson said the project first tried to interest students in reading stories by introducing them to diverse authors dealing with issues of heritage, including Latin Americans, Europeans, Africans and Asians. Educators then taught students the basic structure of writing essays.

“With the changing demographics of Orange County, the students are becoming more and more diverse,” Olson said. “Very often, they’re at school but not academically or emotionally interested in school. We wanted to come up with a way to engage them more.”

Ten teachers participated in the project, Olson said. They taught at a variety of schools, from Santiago Middle School in Orange, which is about 53% white, to Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, which is about 47% Asian American.

The teaching portion of the project lasted from January to June, 1993, Olson said.

Other educators who collaborated with Olson were: Brenda Borron, of Irvine Valley College; Pat Clark, of Century High School in Santa Ana, and Bob Land, of the Center for the Study of Evaluation at UCLA.