We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Doreen Starke-Meyerring Award for the best article or chapter in writing and discourse studies in 2023 are: Katja Thieme and Jennifer Walsh-Marr, for their manuscript entitled “First Year International Students and the Language of Indigenous Studies.”
Thieme and Walsh-Marr’s article advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous studies in first-year international writing courses as a means of highlighting local, and international, Indigenous issues while simultaneously engaging in language instruction. Their article invites readers to consider how to integrate Indigenous studies into writing classrooms in a compelling and approachable way that also accounts for diverse approaches to writing pedagogy, which is itself especially relevant given the number of Canadian institutions that have made commitments to implement TRC recommendations. In addition to being a highly applicable and transferable article, especially for writing teachers, Thieme and Walsh-Marr highlight the tensions and dissonance that can accompany the actual practice of teaching writing and consider how engagement with Indigenous studies helps make these tensions more overt in order that we might better grapple with them.
The committee also wishes to recognize, as an honourable mention, Kim Mitchell’s article, “Language as a Proxy for Race: Language and Literacy for the Nursing Profession.” Mitchell’s article brings a fresh and critical perspective to how writing studies scholarship, and scholars, can position themselves as viable interdisciplinary partners for fields like nursing. Mitchell’s approachable overview of how a critical writing studies perspective might inform nursing education brings into sharp focus some of the problematic implications of teaching so-called Standard English to nursing students. The actionable recommendations Mitchell discusses, while directly related to nursing, are also clearly applicable across disciplines.
The committee wishes to thank everyone who submitted nominations this year. The quality of the research and writing of all submissions was particularly high this year and speaks to the excellent, and important, work in which members of our association are engaged.
Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Association Canadienne de Rédactologie 