Candidates for the 2023-2026 ISAWR Steering Committee and Vice Chair
Please vote for one Vice Chair and up to four Steering Committee members.
ISAWR is committed to a Steering Committee that represents a range of continents and countries, as well as a range of research disciplines and research focus on various grade levels. We ask members to keep this in mind as you make your election choices.
Vice Chair Candidates
Rui A. Alves is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Porto, Portugal. His main research interests are the cognitive and affective processes in writing, which he studies using experimental methods and logging tools. He is also interested in literacy development, writing instruction, and learning disorders. He and his team have studied the development of text production using an own–developed handwriting logging software (HandSpy) and developed many evidence-based writing interventions addressing cognitive, motivational, and self-regulatory aspects of writing. He serves on many editorial boards and is associate editor of the journal Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Springer. He is a former coordinator of the Special Interest Group on Writing (2011-2015) of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, EARLI. Currently, he is the interim coordinator of the European Literacy Network, ELN, and serves on the Executive Committee of EARLI. Most of his publications are available at ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1657-8945 or RG: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rui_Alves10. Contact: ralves@fpce.up.pt
Candidate interest in the role: “ISAWR is a recent society, we are thus fortunate and well aware of the vision that Chuck, Paul, Tiane, and Chris (and many notable others) have for this society. I share that vision of a global multilingual, interdisciplinary writing research community that enables collaboration across borders towards advancing writing research and espousing a humanistic worldview. This is the vision that, by serving as a vice-chair, I wish to help fulfill. ISAWR can continue to do a lot, especially by engaging and supporting young scholars, establishing a multilingual journal, improving communication among members, and enduring a global writing research community with the special characteristics of ISAWR. My commitment is to continue working with the ISAWR steering group to expand and engage its membership so that together we can thrive and continue pushing forward writing research all over the globe.”
Federico Navarro is an Argentinian-Chilean scholar. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics. He is the chair of the School of Education and an associate professor at the Institute of Education Sciences, Universidad de O’Higgins (Chile). He has been the chair of the Latin American Association of Writing Studies in Higher Education and Professional Contexts (ALES). He has also served as a member of the Steering Committee, the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research (ISAWR), and co-chair of the International Collaborations Committee, the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC). He has been the chief editor of the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing Series, Latin American Section, The WAC Clearinghouse. He has been a principal or co-investigator in 11 research projects on writing and education during the last decade. He has published around 150 papers in 12 countries.
Candidate interest in the role: “I am interested in serving as the vice chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research (ISAWR). My professional life as a scholar has been one of permanent boundary-crossing (between languages, traditions, countries, and continents) and networking (between scholars with different expertise, races, nationalities, disciplines, identities). I have been an active member of different international associations and scholarly projects (book series, translations, special issues, research projects) which allowed me to learn from people’s perspectives, foster the institutionalization of our joint efforts, and build new bridges between different ways of understanding disciplinary knowledge, teaching, and research. I have also led international projects and collaborations in their initial steps and consolidation (ALES, AWAC, IE Series Latin American Section). I believe that I could use this expertise and experience to serve as ISAWR vice-chair. I would like to expand the active participation of ISAWR members with different backgrounds and located in different places, and to foster institutionalized connections between ISAWR and other regional organizations.”
Steering Committee Candidates
Guadalupe Álvarez
Dr. Alvarez is a Doctor of Letters (National University of Cuyo) and Professor and Graduate of Letters (National University of Mar del Plata). She works as an Independent Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Council (CONICET), and as a Researcher-Adjunct professor at the Human Development Institute of the National University of General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Proposing intersections between several topics –reading, writing, teaching, learning, digital culture and technologies – has been a key concern in her research, teaching, dissemination, and outreach work. Throughout her career as a teacher and scientist, she has often sought to carry out interdisciplinary and inter-institutional work at the national and, occasionally, the international level. Moreover, in most of her scientific and teaching activities she encourages a collaborative approach, connecting with researchers from different regions of my country, Argentina, and with colleagues worldwide (e.g., Colombia, Peru, Mexico, USA, Spain, Germany). In fact, she has carried out different research stays on education, writing and digital technologies in Germany, the United States, Barcelona and Colombia, financed by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Carolina Foundation and the Colombian Institute of Educational Credit and Technical Studies at the Exterior, respectively. Regarding her language skills, Spanish is her mother tongue; as for English, she is highly proficient in reading and has a good command in oral and written communication.
Candidate interest in the role: “With regard to my nomination acceptance, several reasons motivate my decision. Seeing through the development of interdisciplinary research into the many dimensions of writing and learning of writing would be of great interest to me. Furthermore, I believe that works from a Latin American view are significant contributions to the main missions of ISAWR. In this regard, I am interested in joining the international collaborative networks associated with ISAWR.”
Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão
Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão is an associate professor at the State University of Londrina (UEL), a permanent member of UEL’s Postgraduate Program in Language Studies and part of its Coordinating Commission. She is also the leader of the Language and Education research group at UEL and a researcher for the Language Analysis, Educational Work and its Relations Group at the University of São Paulo. She has both master’s and PhD in Applied Linguistics and Language Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (LAEL-PUC-SP), with a sandwich period at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Geneva. She has a post-doctoral internship at LAEL-PUC-SP (2008), one at the Postgraduate Program in Linguistic Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (2012) and another one at Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal (2022). She was a visiting researcher at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, with a CAPES/FULBRIGHT fellowship, at the post-doctoral level, and a visiting researcher at Carleton University, Canada. She has been a Research Productivity Fellow of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development since 2013. She is the Portuguese text editor at WAC Clearinghouse Latin America, the editor of the Journal of the Brazilian National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistics (ANPOLL) and the coordinator of its Text Genres and Discourse Work Group (SIG). She is also the vice-president of the Latin American Association for the Study of Writing in Higher Education and Professional Contexts (ALES). She is the general coordinator of the Integrated Laboratory of Academic-Scientific Literacies in Paraná, Brazil. She currently works in Applied Linguistics with research in genres, initial and continuing education of language teachers, language teaching, and academic-scientific and environmental literacies.
Candidate interest in the role: “I am interested in serving on the ISAWR (International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research) Steering Committee to collaborate. I consider my position of vice-president of the Latin American Association for the Study of Writing in Higher Education and Professional Contexts (ALES) as a representative of many researchers in the field of Writing Studies. So being a member of the Steering Committee is an opportunity to collaborate, to learn, to share and to contribute to our field of research.”
Kristine Kabel
Dr. Kabel is an associate professor at the School of Education, Aarhus University in Denmark. She gained her PhD in 2016 with a dissertation about disciplinary writing in the lower secondary literature classroom. Since then, she has been engaged in focused ethnographic and text oriented writing and literacy research within and across school subjects at the primary and lower secondary levels. In two cross-institutional research projects Gramma3 (2017–2018) and Game-Based Learning (GBL21, 2017–2023), she investigated grammar teaching practices within and across first and foreign language school subjects and multiple literacy practices in language arts / L1, science and math respectively. Currently, she participates in a large interdisciplinary project on young students’ early writing development approached from a social semiotic linguistic perspective (Automated Tracking of Early skills Literacy, 2018-2023), and from 2022-2025, she is the PI for a qualitative research project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (read more here) exploring the relations between students’ writing and metalinguistic repertoires in language arts / L1. She is a steering group member of the network for Danish L1 researchers (DaDi) and the equivalent Nordic network for research in L1 Education (NNFF), furthermore, since her PhD in a network for research within the Nordic L1 literature classroom. In 2022, she co-edited a special issue about writing research in Scandinavia in the journal Writing and Pedagogy together with Bremholm, Liberg and Skar.
Candidate interest in the role: “As a member of the ISAWR steering group, I would work for continued dialogue and new collaborations between educational writing research environments in Scandinavia and other regions in the world.”
Xinghua Liu
Dr. Liu is Associate Professor at the English Department of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading, UK, and completed his postdoctorate training in writing research at Arizona State University, USA. He has wide writing research interests spanning from evidence-based foreign language education; intercultural rhetoric; corpus and SFL-based discourse analysis; cognitive processes of written production; evidence-based teaching practice for writing; individual differences in writing classrooms; teaching and learning writing for students with learning difficulties; to writing-based diagnosis and treatment for patients with mental disorders. He also has extensive editorship activity. Currently, he is the Chief Editor of the International Journal of TESOL Studies, Co-editor of the International Journal of Chinese Language Teaching, and Executive Editor of the New Techno-Humanities. A professional profile of him is available at https://sfl.sjtu.edu.cn/En/Data/View/1920
Carolyn McKinney
Dr. McKinney is Professor of Language Education in the School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Carolyn is involved in teacher education, convenes the PhD programme and the M.Ed in Applied Language and Literacy studies in the School of Education. She is a founding member of the bua-lit collective (www.bua-lit.org.za) which advocates for bi/multilingual education and ‘rich literacies’ for African language speaking children. Her research focuses on language ideologies and their impact on language policy as well as different sites of practice; multilingualism as a resource for learning and the intersection of language and race in contexts of coloniality. Recent publications include Decoloniality, Language and Literacy: Conversations with Teacher Educators (2022, Multilingual Matters) and Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (2017, Routledge).
Candidate interest in the role: “I am interested in joining the steering committee of ISAWR as I am passionate about making visible the rich research and pedagogies located in the global South as well as strengthening and developing new South-South networks of collaboration. I am also concerned with challenging the often exclusive, or over-focus, on ‘reading’ and ‘learning to read’ in literacy in sub-Saharan Africa that is largely driven by research in North America and Europe. I believe that ISAWR may have a role to play in countering this narrow focus. (website: https://humanities.uct.ac.za/school-education/contacts/carolyn-mckinne/full?subsite=246)”
Natalia Ávila Reyes
Dr. Natalia Avila Reyes is an Associate Professor of Education at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics (PUC, Chile), a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning, and a Ph.D. in Education with a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Composition (University of California, Santa Barbara. She is interested in writing at different stages of life. She currently lead funded research projects on students’ experiences with writing in expanding higher education systems and on how to create fairer large-scale writing assessments for the Chilean educational system.
Candidate interest in the role: “I would like to join the ISAWR Steering committee because I believe I can bring in voices of researchers from non-anglophone countries and contribute to creating a more equitable and decolonized forum for international scholarly conversations and exchanges on writing research.”
David Slomp
Dr. Slomp is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research in Education at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada) where he is also Professor of Literacy and Assessment and Board of Governors Teaching Chair. He is the University of Lethbridge’s appointed leader to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Since 2017, he has been serving as co-editor-in-chief of Assessing Writing. His research focuses on the social consequences of writing assessment design and use, on ethics, fairness, and justice in writing assessment, and on the development of writing ability. His research has been published in The Handbook of Writing Research and in a broad range of international literacy and composition journals including Research in the Teaching of English, College Composition and Communication, Assessing Writing, the Journal of Writing Assessment, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, the Journal of Writing Analytics, and the English Journal. David’s interest in serving on the ISAWR steering committee stems from his work as editor of the leading international journal in the field of writing assessment. From his editor’s desk he gets a first-hand view of the rich and diverse research on writing being conducted across the globe. At the same time, he recognizes that more opportunities for dialogue and collaboration across regional, disciplinary, and educational contexts will advance our programs of research and the educational systems they impact.
Candidate interest in the role: “I am energized by ISAWR’s commitment to bringing together writing researchers from across diverse contexts, and am eager to work with ISAWR’s steering committee to further advance its mission: developing interdisciplinary research into the many dimensions of writing and learning of writing of people of all ages, languages, and other characteristics; and fostering research in all regions of the world to support communication among researchers of all regions and disciplines.”