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This chapter analyses student notes as a dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. In the sociocultural tradition, note writing, like any writing, is seen as a social act that holds a cultural and an individual meaning. There is a large psychological-cognitive and a somewhat smaller social and sociocultural research literature on student notes. The chapter focuses on a dialogical view on note writing, and explores the meanings of note writing from a student perspective. It addresses the following question: what is student note writing an answer to? The chapter presents the case study of three students: Sofia, Michael, and, to a lesser extent, Rasmus. All three students were participants in the longitudinal writing research project Writing to Learn, Learning to Write (WLLW) which follows students from year nine to year twelve. Sofia regularly writes notes as part of her homework, a practice that was not used as consequently by other students in the WLLW project.

Linking national language syllabi to proficiency frameworks like the Common European Framework of Reference impacts on school-leaving examinations. This study tracks how the political decision to reform the national school-leaving exam in Austria instigated changes in classroom teaching and assessment practices of writing. Analyzing teacher-designed classroom writing tasks developed pre- and post-introduction of standardized tasks, and survey data from teachers affected by the reform, it will demonstrate that there has been an observable change in classroom practices after the exam reform, but that changing teachers’ attitudes remains challenging for test developers in their communication with practitioners at the chalkface.

This chapter offers a glimpse into the practices of writing in higher education in a European country and describes the influence of macro-level educational policies on writing in undergraduate studies. The context is a major educational reform in Norway called the Quality Reform implemented in the higher education sector from 2002. The Quality Reform affected the structure, financing, and leadership of higher education as well as the pedagogy. The reform is closely connected with the “Bologna process,” the most important effort ever made to align higher education systems in all European countries.1 Periods of reform offer a particularly interesting time setting for research because cultural traditions and established practices are then being challenged, lines of division among faculty become visible, and underlying views of teaching and learning come to the fore, even in academic cultures where this is not usually on the agenda. Norwegian universities, like most continental European universities, previously required very little undergraduate student writing and mainly assessed students on traditional sit-down exams. The Quality Reform did not explicitly deal with this situation, but nevertheless one of the pedagogical consequences of the reform was that virtually all courses now include compulsory student writing assignments and teacher feedback. The empirical basis for this chapter consists of two nationwide survey studies of higher education in Norway in which I have been involved and two case studies, one in history and one in law. The most comprehensive of the surveys is the research evaluation study of the Quality Reform while the second is a study of portfolio practices after the reform. The following overarching questions are discussed, drawing on sociocultural theory perspectives: (1) To what extent has the Quality Reform resulted in change in writing and feedback practices? (2) How can these changes be explained inrelation to other aspects in the reform like changes in assessment (i.e., portfolios)? (3) What other factors have contributed to the change? In order to provide a context for the readers I will focus primarily on the reform as this is essential to understand the significance of the findings and the discussion.

Introduction There is growing interest across a range of disciplines and practices in ‘narrative’ and the co-construction of narratives as a useful root metaphor for understanding the ways that human beings construct, make sense of and transform their lives. The collection of ideas and practices that has become known as ‘narrative therapy’ might be regarded as a ‘practice of writing ‘in a number of ways. It is a ‘storied’ therapy that has strong roots within narrative, poststructuralist and literary theory and uses much of the language of these traditions. Narrative therapy presents quite a challenge to therapeutic practices that focus primarily on individual potential or ‘inner state’ psychology (see White 2001, for a discussion of these differences). It positions personal agency firmly within social and political discourses, and the cultural and historical traditions and ‘local’ stories that are available to people. In this way the construction of ‘alternative’ or preferred stories in therapeutic conversations, however fleeting or tentative, may be seen as something of an extraordinary achievement that warrants a written record in order to be more firmly captured and embraced.

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. Written by well-known scholars from around the world, it closely attends to the digitalization of writing and literacies that is transforming daily life and education. The chapter topics—identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes—are organized thematically in five sections: • Digital Futures • Digital Diversity • Digital Lives • Digital Spaces • Digital Ethics This is an essential guide to digital writing and literacies research, with transformational ideas for educational and professional practice. It will enable new and established researchers to position their studies within highly relevant directions in the field and to generate new themes of inquiry.