Swedish language advisors’ textually mediated encounters with dilemmas in their writing centre consultations.

• This presentation reports an ongoing research project investigating the development and professionalization of centralized support for academic language and writing in Swedish universities. While research on this kind of literacy support has a long tradition and has been carried out in many parts of the world (Essid & McTague, 2020), the Swedish context represents a case where centralization is recent and still unregulated (Lennartson-Hokkanen, 2016). Universities can therefore organise support for academic writing and language autonomously and according to their own specific needs and purposes. A strong growth in numbers of centralized support units has been noticed recently (Bjernhage & Grönvall Fransson, 2017). This growth comes in the wake of increased mobility, internationalisation, and broadening participation (Kaufhold & Yenken, 2021). What also makes the Swedish context important to study is that central units of this kind usually recruit teachers, academics and scholars as professional advisors, whereas peer tutoring is rare. Staff members come from a variety of educational backgrounds, but a strong grounding in the field of Linguistics or Languages is common. However, our material shows that the everyday work for language advisors implies pedagogically demanding situations where students’ expectations on immediate text improvement at the level of grammar and text structure collide with advisors’ ambitions to serve each individual in the best of ways and provide ‘strategies’ for writing that point beyond the immediate text. So, advising exemplifies a pedagogical academic literacy practice where an intricate mix of institutionally grounded tensions need to be handled by individual advisors in the role of literacy experts. The objective of the project to be reported is therefore to demonstrate how academic literacy expertise, specifically required for scaffolding students’ writing through advising sessions, is being developed through situations requiring expert judgment and actions. The primary empirical data consists of a collection of video-recordings from a series of professional competence development workshops that were carried out 2021-2022. In these workshops, staff members from centralized writing centres in four different Swedish universities met for the purpose of sharing their advising experiences and discussing specific challenges and dilemmas. Each participating university took responsibility for organizing one workshop and each workshop consisted of a mix of whole group activities and group-work. In the smaller groups, individual advisors were teamed up with colleagues from the other contributing universities and thus came to represent their own writing centre and institution. The video-material is complemented by a collection of texts participants produced and used as part of the workshops. The conversational nature of these workshops allows for a dialogical approach (Linell, 2021) to how relevant literacy expertise is mediated as individual professional advisors from different institutions work with sample dilemmas. Such a theoretical grounding implies analytical attention to how the participants interactively anticipate and coordinate with each other as they share and discuss their individual samples. A series of textually mediated activities have been selected and transcribed. The currently ongoing analytical work is guided by the following questions: - How is academic literacy expertise produced and moulded in the interaction around the participants’ sample dilemmas? - What means for solutions to problems are introduced and made relevant by the participants? The contributions of this research are partly empirical, partly methodological. While writing centres and writing centre practice have been extensively studied (e.g. Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2018), the underpinnings of the Swedish case are comparatively under-explored. This study adds to organisational and practice perspectives in the field of writing research as it attends to professional advising as a pedagogical and epistemologically grounded practice. Findings so far indicate a series of tensions that seem to characterise the Swedish context specifically, and significant professional development processes for individual writing centre staff members. For example, professional advisors’ literacy expertise involves balancing historically developed notions of ‘language’ vs. ‘writing’ and appropriating a developmental view of students’ needs.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Writing centres

professional knowledge

academic literacy

interaction

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