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.

In this essay, I endeavour to broaden the concept of literature by introducing five children’s literary works. Primarily, literary scholars have concentrated their studies on literature written by adults, regarding children as readers rather than writers. I believe that such a concept fails to cover the diversity of the literary field and therefore needs to change. Approaching writing and reading from a sociocultural point of view, and reading children’s stories from a narratological perspective, I intend to show that a new concept of literature is not only possible but inevitable. Due to the dialectic relationship between sender and receiver, literary and linguistic conventions and deviations, the definition of literature is renegotiated continuously. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the impact of the academy by illustrating that scholars are maintaining literary norms when putting titles on reading lists and acknowledging certain authorships. Writing this essay is thus a pledge of change. Adult research of children’s literary work encompasses a wide range of implicit age-related power issues (aetonormativity), according to the Swedish literary scholar, Maria Nikolajeva. In this essay, I show an insufficiency of some of these adult literary concepts when applied to children’s writing. I conclude that a partly new terminology, based on children’s writing, needs to co-exist with the older set of concepts. I also emphasize the need for further literary studies on children’s writing to question, criticize and complete mine, and to acknowledge the variety of literary aspects in children’s writing.