This dissertation examines Swedish writing centers’ pedagogical positions in relation to surrounding conditions through a case study of organization, attitudes and learning potential in a pedagogical collaboration project on writing with many multilingual students. The data consists of steering documents, students’ texts, interviews, observations, and recorded tutorials. The general aim of the thesis is to explore the learning potential for participants in the collaborative project. The theoretical framework has a sociocultural approach drawn from New Literacy Studies, Wenger’s Social Learning Theory and Dialogism. Three studies are included. The first study examines organizational conditions in the specific context and shows that the writing center and its tutors have marginalized positions separated from relevant research. The second study finds that conceptions of writing as a skill, alongside those of writing as a process limit students’ opportunity for meaning-making and contesting. The third study focuses on tutorial interaction and results show that  tutors support students by i) discussing norms and conventions, ii) strengthening students as writers and second language learners and iii) stimulating meaning making and participation, which seems to increase potential for negotiation and developing academic writing. General conclusions suggest that writing centers have potential to be sites for pedagogical development where tutors can share, with students and staff, their expertise gained when working with a diverse student population. To strengthen writing centers’ position at universities professionalization of tutors is needed and most importantly research needs to be conducted in writing centers. Students from diverse backgrounds are entering higher education and to value their knowledge and experiences is crucial, not least from a democratic perspective. The writing center can play an important role in this effort.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Marc Prensky’s digital natives theory became popular, because it supplied teachers with answer as to why students were unresponsive to their curriculums. In essence, Prensky’s theory asks: what has changed? In most cases, it is not the teachers’ curriculums that have changed, so it has to be something else. Prensky points to digital technologies, because teachers are now having to teach students who never knew a world without digital technologies—Prensky, of course, asserting that this changes the way students think, which naturally transfers over to how they learn. In short, it is the students that have changed due to digital technologies. According to Prensky, students, within the digital natives generation, would value their courses more if teachers utilized digital technologies in their classroom. However, critics of the digital natives theory assert that Prensky has not considered many variables that could have an effect on how students use digital technologies, such as socio-economic factors, gender, education, and geographic location, and ultimately there is no empirical evidence to support the use of digital technologies in Prensky’s pedagogy (see Sue Bennett and Karl Maton, Chris Jones et al., Anoush Margaryan et al., and Neil Selwyn). Although, I mostly agree with the critics evaluations of the digital natives theories, I believe that there are larger economic variables, such as Gee et al.’s new capitalism, that influence how students value digital technologies as well as literacy and learning. This concept was reflected in the survey that I conducted in order to examine how students value W131 in general, the writing done in W131, and writing done in social digital technologies. The survey demonstrated that students do not understand social digital writing to be writing; therefore, utilizing digital technologies in the writing classroom, as Prensky suggest, would not be beneficial, because it would take a great deal of class time for students to come to the understanding that social digital writing is writing. More importantly, the survey indicated that students are highly career motivated, which influences how students value their courses. For students, a course’s value is determined by how applicable it is to students’ career goals. The survey results suggest that while students recognize that first-year composition (FYC) has value, they do not necessarily see it specifically valuable to their primary goals. Although I believe it is important for students to be able to find value in a course, I am not suggesting that FYC should be tailored to cater to students; on the contrary, I believe that the ideal FYC course would acknowledge the values of the field of study that it pertains to, and attempt to demonstrate to students how those values relate to their own. This is ideal—however, by using the Writing about Writing pedagogy, designed by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, this kind of value system may be possible. Downs and Wardle’s pedagogy also has the potential to bridge the value systems of the students, and writing studies, because Downs and Wardle’s pedagogy focuses on students gaining a better understanding of writing studies as a field of study, by engaging and exploring texts that represent writing studies’ central beliefs and important works. Through texts that come out of the writing studies discipline students can gain a better understanding of concepts that come out of writing studies, as well as build a bridge between students’ values and the values of the writing studies discipline. Texts such as chapter six (“The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification as the Twenty-First Century) of Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives, James Paul Gee’s “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn,’” and Harvey Graff’s “The Literacy Myth at Thirty,” offers students a new perspective on the economic climate that effects the job market, as well as provide a meaningful way into writing studies. In this chapter, I will discuss Downs and Wardle’s Writing about Writing pedagogy, how I would implement their pedagogy in a FYC course, and what would be the ideal learning outcomes for this course.

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