In this article, we discuss the results of a study within the project Language work as care work. The study focuses on the documentation practices of carers and assistant nurses within three elder care facilities in Sweden. The aim is to explore how representations of work and work content are remediated and recontextualised in some of the key written genres in the nursing home. In this process different discourses, and thus different versions of the practice of caring, are promoted and restrained. In order to show how the literacy practices and written text genres of elder care construe different meanings of caring we closely examine four key genres in the communicative chain and analyse them in terms of genre and discourse. The data discussed here was collected in an eighteen months ethnographic study, using participant observation, qualitative interviews and collection of key texts as the main tools.

Independence is becoming an increasingly important factor in Swedish higher education, especially in relation to undergraduate degree projects. Despite this, there is no shared understanding of what independence is or whether it is to be found in the finished text or in the supervision interaction. In this article I look at one specific definition of independence: the ability to position oneself and one’s work in relation to sources. Three supervision meetings are analysed, selected from a larger body of recorded material from teacher education courses in Sweden. I explore how independence can be enacted in the supervision of undergraduate degree projects, drawing on the analytical framework of appraisal. The theoretical framework is derived from the socio-cultural and dialogical perspective, which proposes that learning and understanding develop in context through interaction and dialogue. Independence, from this perspective, is something that can be explored in enactments in interactions of different kinds. The findings show that the students use different resources in order to relate to sources on different levels, and these levels could be related to independence in different ways.