In accordance with our constitution, the current board needs to report back to the membership and account for its 2017-2019 activities as well as discuss the items on the General assembly agenda. As an association, we also need the election of a new board for the 2019-2021 period. In 2017, we combined the election process with the General Assembly, and we hope to be able to use the same procedure for EATAW2019.
General Assembly
The General assembly is scheduled for Tuesday July 2, at 17.15 in Lecture theatre 1 in the SB-building (SB-H1). No items for the agenda have been put forward by members; therefore, the board has the following agenda:
1. Setting the agenda
2. Opening Reports: Chair, Treasurer, Web secretary, Membership secretary, JOAW
3. Communication Strategy and IT matters
4. Suggesting bids for EATAW conference 2021 and 2023
5. Bridging gaps with other organizations and interest groups
6. The future role of EATAW board
7. WRAB2020 proposal
8. Voting for new Board
9. Close
Election procedure
The candidates standing for the board will give a short presentation of themselves during the first EATAW board slot in the schedule on the Tuesday morning before lunch. There will be some time during lunch and in the afternoon to talk to the candidates. We we meet for the General Assembly you will give the ballot papers and the vote will be held as you leave the room. Results are announced in the closing session of the conference. After the closing session or during a Thursday slot, the new board meets for the first time and assigns roles and responsibilities.
Presentation of candidates (pdf)
Alena Kašpárková
My name is Alena Kašpárková, and I live and work in the Czech Republic. The concepts of academic writing teaching, publication support and writing centre work have been new to the Czech Republic. I learnt about the world of academic writing in 2012, since when I have promoted this field across the country. Since 2014 I have been with the VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, where I run voluntary courses in academic writing to support PhD students and my colleagues to write effectively in English, and serve as an editor-in-chief of a scholarly journal. I am a principal investigator of an applied research project, which will result in a compulsory academic writing course for PhD students in the near future. In the project, I cooperate with the university library, colleagues from IT and the Writing Centre at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Since my first energizing encounter with EATAW in Budapest, I have attended and presented at the following three EATAW conferences, including Gothenburg. Having gained some experience in the field, I would like to become a more active member of the association, help organize the conferences, and contribute to running the Journal of Academic Writing.
Alma Jahić Jašić
My association with EATAW started in 2009 when I attended EATAW conference for the first time (in Coventry, UK). Since then I attended one more EATAW conference, i.e. the one in Tallinn (in 2015) and I plan to attend this year’s conference in Goteborg.
My attendance of EATAW conferences was made possible by EATAW scholarships and since I believe that I should not only be at the receiving end, but rather that I should also contribute something to the association, I have decided to apply for the EATAW board. I am interested in the position of membership secretary as I believe that I would be able to perform duties required by this position.
Regarding my interest in academic writing, it was kindled by a visiting professor at the English Studies Department I work at. This interest led me to write my master’s thesis as well as my doctoral dissertation on the topic of academic writing. As Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country in which educational institutions rarely offer explicit writing instruction, as is the case with university I work at, I have been trying to teach elements of academic writing through my research methodology courses.
Amanda French
Dr Amanda French has taught academic writing development in higher, further, adult education and the voluntary sector in the UK for over 30 years. Amanda is currently Head of Professional Development, Research and Enterprise and a Reader in Teaching and Learning at Birmingham City University’s School of Education and Social Work. Her particular research interests include participatory child-led research, academic writing practices and development, social justice in education and creative critical pedagogies and methodologies and practice and policy around teaching excellence. Her PhD was about lecturers’ perceptions of academic writing and she has published and presented on this and related areas extensively nationally and internationally. She has been secretary for the EATAW committee for two years.
Christian Rapp
Herewith I would like to submit my application to run for the EATAW board. I have been teaching research methodology and academic writing for nearly ten years at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Each semester roughly 800 BA thesis are written in our Swiss business school. Time and budget constraints ask for efficient supervision leading to the question of scaling instruction (addressed e.g. at ACM L@S conference). Given that my background is instructional technology we designed, implemented and researched a technological solution in an interdisciplinary team in the last five years – Thesis Writer. The work on Thesis Writer encouraged us to do more research and networking in the area of academic writing technologies within, among others European Literacy Network WG 3, pertinent contributions at EATAW 2017 and 2019, a recent published review in Computers & Education and organizing the 8th International Conference on Writing Analytics September 2019 in Winterthur Switzerland. My contribution to EATAW would be as a non-expert in academic writing, there are for sure many at EATAW already, but in educational technology and to a smaller degree writing analytics. My aim would be to contribute precisely in the area of technological support for academic writing i.e. the digitalization debate, an area developing at breathtaking speed, and ensuring that practitioners and scholars in the field do not miss these important developments. Furthermore, it would be a concern to me to support exchange with our North American colleagues that, in many areas, are far ahead in technological support of academic writing. At the same time, I would like to further bundle the many cutting-edge contributions of the European developers and scholars and ensure stimulating further fruitful exchange with our North American colleagues.
CV and publications
Djuddah Leijen
I have had the honour to chair the EATAW board for the past 2 years. These years have been both challenging and educational. The biggest challenge has been to take over a well run board which had, over the years, build a well-established organisation. When the new board was established after the London 2017 EATAW conference, several issues had to be addressed to further establish EATAW in preparation for the 2019 conference and beyond. Unfortunately, we have not managed to solve some of these issues (such as the member database and updating the website), and these will remain a challenge for the next period. As such, I feel that the aims I set for myself and EATAW has not been met as of yet, and therefore I would like to run again as board chair (or any other function within the board) to continue the work to guide along EATAW.
In the past years, in addition to being part of the EATAW board, I have further develop the The Nordic and Baltic Network for Writing in Higher Education (NB!Write) which brings together writing initiatives in universities and university colleges in the Nordic and Baltic region. I have also served in the core group of the Cost Action We ReLaTe, and been an active MC member for the ELN literacy network. Furthermore, at my home university in Estonia, I have led a small team of people to develop a PhD writing program called Communicating Science, which aims to provide a flexible learning environment for students of the university of Tartu and interested people all over the world.
If I get re-elected, one of the first aims will be to better streamline the activities of our board members to address, amongst other, the membership’s database, an improved website with increased visibility and member’s access to EATAW, building bridges with outside organizations, such as EWCA, NB!Write, and other special interest groups. In addition, we have discussed ways in which we can get members much more involved in the future activities of EATAW as an organization, and I would certainly wish to further use our shared capacity to make this work.
Erin Bethany Zimmerman
Erin is an assistant professor at the American University of Beirut in the English Department and is presently finishing a 3-year term as Director of the Writing Center and Writing in the Disciplines Program. She became acquainted with EATAW when presenting at the 2013 conference in Budapest, and found EATAW to be an organization filled with collegial, supportive, and diverse members.
Over the past two years, she has served on the EATAW Board and has greatly enjoyed learning more about the history of the organization as well as working with the current board to maintain and strengthen the work EATAW and its affiliates do teaching writing in all contexts. She hopes to continue to serve on the board to continue this work.
Erin’s research centers on Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, and composition pedagogy, specifically on considering instructors’ abilities to guide students’ learning in their disciplines and to support students’ transfer of learning across the disciplines. Specific to this year’s conference, she is hosting a roundtable conversation related to survey research she is conducting at AUB to learn about students’ and faculty members’ perceptions of, actions surrounding, and reactions to plagiarism.
José Brandao Carvalho
I was born in 1958. I work as Associate Professor (with Habilitation) at the University of Minho, in Portugal. I have been in Higher Education for almost 30 years, teaching several disciplines in the area of Language Education, including Portuguese Language (L1 and L2/FL) Didactics, Academic Writing and Research Methodologies.
My interest in Academic Writing emerged after I got my PhD in Portuguese Language Didactics in 1998, as a consequence of the recognition of the importance of writing as a learning tool. Although there is no tradition of teaching Academic Writing in Portuguese Higher Education in Portugal, since 2002 I have been teaching semester optional courses in this area, with good results and acceptance among students. I chose academic literacy as the topic of my Habilitation Exam in 2014.
I share a situated vision of academic literacy that, rather than teaching students the application of writing techniques, aims at promoting the appropriation of academic genres through meaningful practices in real contexts of language use. Academic literacy is also one of my research interests and since 2005 I’ve been engaged in national and international projects focussed on different dimensions of this subject, such as the description of students’ literacy practices, the identification of students’ difficulties and the thesis writing process.
My first participation in EATAW activities took place in 2007 in Bochum, and since then I’ve participated in four other conferences (Coventry, 2009; Limerick, 2011; Budapest, 2013; London, 2017). In 2017, I was elected to the EATAW Board.
Due to its scope, I think EATAW is one of the most important associations in the field of academic literacy and its action has certainly provided major contributions to the development of Higher Education in Europe and beyond.
Kärt Rummel
I would like to stand for election to EATAW Board again as I am very much interested in contributing to the growth of EATAW and exploring new dimensions of academic writing with the wonderful people of EATAW. While my formal association with EATAW is quite recent with the membership established only in 2013, it was in 2006 at a conference in Estonia with John Harbord that I first received information about EATAW. By today, I have gained significant knowledge of the background and practices of EATAW. Hosting the 8th biennial conference of EATAW in Estonia in 2015 at Tallinn University of Technology (now TalTech) was indeed a rich learning experience for life. The management duties of EATAW 2015 provided me with a valuable experience of collaboration and enabled me to communicate with many of the EATAW members, some of the most skillful and knowledgeable people in the world academia, who all share my understanding of the importance of teaching and researching academic writing.
My interest in academic writing was initiated by the British Council Pan-Baltic Advanced Writing Project with Professor Ron White and Clare Furneaux of the University of Reading in 1995, followed by a Pan-Baltic International Conference of Academic Writing at Tallinn University of Technology in 1996. My doctoral dissertation “Creating Coherent Texts in English as a Foreign Language: Theory and Practice” (2010) from Tartu University was a logical succession to my Master’s Thesis “How to Write Reader-Friendly Texts: Common Problems in the English Academic Writing of Estonian Writers” (2005). My research interests lie in applied linguistics, academic literacy studies, L2/L1 academic writing, text and discourse, discourse analysis, contrastive rhetoric, among others. I have been a member of CSW (Communication Skills Workshop Special Interest Group) based at the University of Helsinki since 1996 and Chair twice (2006-2008/2013-2015). I am an affiliate member of LIHERG (Language in Higher Education Research Group), Queen Mary, University of London. I have more than 30 years of working experience in tertiary education both in academic and administrative positions, in 1994-2001 as Head of English Department, since June 2014 as Head of the Language Centre of Tallinn University of Technology, and since January 2017 with the restructuring of the university as Head of the Centre for Language and Communication of Taltech. In all these roles, I have gained considerable administrative and professional experience that I would like to share with colleagues in EATAW.
I believe that my academic background and knowledge of best practices of tertiary education in the region should give me a good platform to represent the interests and concerns of academic professionals involved with writing and thus contribute to the growth of EATAW. I will be very much honoured to provide EATAW with my knowledge, skills and expertise and commit my effort and time to support the association for another two years if elected.
Magnus Gustafsson
My background is one of running the Division for Language and Communication at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and promoting EATAW concerns in our educational environment. Our work with multiple and progressively arranged integrated communication-oriented interventions for engineering education is one that I have tried to share with EATAW colleagues at the EATAW conferences since 2005. My other interests of EATAW-relevance include:
Peer learning and assessment as critical components in higher education; Disciplinary discourse ability as fundamental to learning; Educational development work for sequences of interventions; Faculty courses that promote greater awareness of writing studies research and its impact among colleagues
I have been a board member since 2009 and I first joined EATAW in 2005. I have found the association an important one and working on the board is a very rewarding honour that I have learnt from these ten years. My work since 2017 has focused on trying to support the incoming chair as far as possible and plan the 2019 conference.
Should I be elected to stay on the board I would like to focus on contributing as an outgoing Chair one more turn. If the board could also find ways to support members more actively, I would like to be part of that. As an association, we have not managed to connect the various regional activities across EATAW in the past few years and that seems a loss of good potential. I would also like to continue working with the journal and support the JoAW editor. A more daunting issue is that of trying to address the challenges facing teachers of academic writing today as far as adapting to rapidly changing and increasingly more demanding higher education conditions with new technologies and communication activities.
Stuart Wrigley
As an experienced teacher of academic writing, and having had a close association with EATAW over the last few years as a frequent attender, presenter and, more recently, as part of the Organising Committee for the last conference in London, I feel that I am ideally placed to stand as member of the EATAW Board.
My role on the Organising Committee for EATAW2017 involved developing and shaping the conference’s theme, selecting and then liaising with keynote speakers, and reviewing submissions of prospective presenters. I was also heavily involved in the subsequent Special Issue of the Journal of Academic Writing, as Guest Editor. This work involved the coordination of the peer review process, and the editing and curation of an issue praised for its high quality.
I see as my strengths a knowledge and understanding of academic writing scholarship and pedagogy, in recognition of which I am recognised as Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I feel I could bring this scholarly knowledge to the Board, as well as my experience organising conferences.
I have produced and continue to produce research in the form of conference papers for associations such as EATAW, BALEAP and WDHE. I wrote an article on plagiarism and handwriting for The Conversation, a British newspaper for academics, and have recently had an article published in Active Learning in Higher Education, a leading UK pedagogical journal.
Tamer Osman
Being an English language lecturer who is currently teaching writing skills and publishing an online course about Academic Writing with Eliademy has incited me to submit candidature as a board member at the disposal of EATAW.