This article explores students' experiences of intellectual, social, and emotional growth during the first year at university and the extent to which these experiences can be considered transformative (Mezirow, 1981). The study is a qualitative interpretative multiple-case study built on semi-structured interviews with students in two higher education contexts, Argentina and Sweden. The results show that most students experience similarly interrelated changes concerning self-confidence, knowledge- and language abilities, critical thinking, and values and beliefs. For some students, these changes lead to profound shifts in how they perceive themselves and their possibilities. Such transformative experiences are emancipatory and empowering, giving students more control over their lives. Other students are gradually changing, experiencing growth in knowledge, literacy, and self-confidence. However, they do not yet experience profound changes in their worldview and how they perceive themselves. Contextual factors related to family life and future profession affect the significance the students attach to experienced changes.     

This article deals with reading as a significant challenge for higher education students. The study aimed to understand students' experiences of challenges in reading during their first three semesters at university and how they handled these challenges. It is a qualitative case study built on in-depth interviews with nine people studying to be primary teachers and their diaries about reading experiences in the academy. The findings show that students experience considerable anxiety and stress regarding finding enough time for reading tasks and comprehending what they read. They soon discover that extensive reading is a prerequisite for writing, questioning, and active participation in lectures and seminars. Despite experiences of lack of support from their teachers, most students identify new approaches and strategies to develop their reading, moving from passive to active engagement with texts. The findings implicate that continuous support from disciplinary experts is crucial for students' reading and writing development. Such support includes inviting students to participate in disciplinary practices, its tools, concepts, ways of thinking, genres used, approaches to reading, and what it means to reason, analyze, and argue in a discipline.

A major challenge for first-year students is the demands on academic writing. The purpose of the study is to identify students' difficulties with writing at the beginning of their education to contribute to the discussion about how students' writing development can be supported. The overall theoretical perspective is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The data consists of texts from the first examination of a primary teacher program. The analysis includes partly a corpus analysis of 125 texts concerning sentence length, word length, the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile, and partly a qualitative text analysis of a selection of eleven students' texts from the larger group concerning text cohesion, composition and use of references. The results indicate that the task design is of great importance for how advanced the students' texts are, based on the proportion of long words, word variation, and lexical profile. Furthermore, students struggle with paragraph division and creating clear relationships between and within paragraphs to create coherent texts. The results also show that the students need support to develop their ability to write from sources. Based on the results, the authors discuss how subject teachers in higher education can support students' writing development. 

Litteracitet har traditionellt beskrivits utifrån människors läs- och skrivförmågor eller förmågan att hantera siffror och enkla problemlösningssituationer i vardagen. I den här antologin tar författarna i stället avstamp i ett vidgat perspektiv på begreppet för att undersöka hur det gestaltar sig inom olika ämnesområden.

Genom exempel från olika klassrum och ämnen belyser författarna ämneslitteracitet och ger uppslag till hur lärare kan arbeta för att utveckla och förstärka elevers ämnesspråkliga kunskaper och förmågor. Utgångspunkten är att ämneslitteracitet och ämnes­kunskaper utvecklas i nära samspel, vilket återspeglas i ett specifikt agerande som tar sig olika uttryck i olika ämnen. Här diskuteras även på vilka sätt som fokus på ämneslitteracitet och ett språk- och kunskapsutvecklande arbetssätt kan medverka till en inkluderande undervisning.

Boken vänder sig främst till lärarstudenter och lärare i grundskola, gymnasieskola och vuxenutbildning.

I Litteraturundervisning och interkulturella möten behandlas frågor om hur ett väl genomtänkt arbete med skönlitteratur kan få oss att utmana föreställningar och tankemönster. I mötet med det som är främmande och annorlunda kan både elever och lärare lockas att gå utanför sina bekvämlighetszoner och kritiskt granska både sig själv och det egna samhället. Boken ger både konkreta exempel på arbete med skönlitteratur i heterogena klassrum och teoretiska perspektiv på läsande och lärande. Lärarnas viktiga roll i valet av texter, arbetsformer och i relation till eleverna ägnas särskild uppmärksamhet. Målet är att skapa en trygg arena som ger utrymme för en mångfald av engagerade röster och kritisk reflektion.