ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at an approach for establishing and maintaining a writing center in a European higher education culture with a limited history of writing centers and peer tutoring, and for a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) university curriculum where engineering and disciplinary, as well as multilingual and multimodal, knowledge becomes increasingly important for students and peer tutors. The authors explore some of the typical, as well as hidden, affordances and challenges, drawing from both the tutor—and director—perspectives. One particular aspect investigated is how a multi-language campus affects the writing center. The chapter also discusses the challenges of recruiting and training tutors across numerous disciplines to prepare them for a context requiring disciplinary genre awareness and a wide range of discourse registers, including a strong emphasis on the multimodal. Furthermore, the various tutor activities in the center are outlined and related to the tutors’ sense of empowerment as peer tutors. The center is also part of a large multidisciplinary writing program at a new department for communication and learning within science. The chapter therefore attempts to draw out the advantages and challenges for the center and the tutors, based on the close connection to the program and the faculty active in it.