Scholars Journal Launch
The Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) is delighted to launch its first annual showcase of student work from the utmONE Scholars Program.
This issue of Writing for University and Beyond: A Journal of First-Year Student Writing at UTM showcases student writing from our unique utmONE Scholars program. This program is characterized by its first-year seminar courses that offer collaborative, small group classroom experiences for high-achieving students. This journal issue features work from two classes: UTM190 Writing in Place, and UTM192 Thinking Badly: Misinformation in the Information Age. In these courses, students develop critical thinking, research, and communication skills. This issue represents their willingness and eagerness to put this learning into action by disseminating their research for a wider audience. It is an attempt to capture the diversity and unique intellectual curiosity of this student cohort.
The papers published in this section were originally written during the winter of 2022. It was a hard term, especially for first-year students with little university experience, as students had to transition from online learning to face-to-face instruction three weeks into the semester. Despite all of this, they thrived. The papers published in this volume were selected based on the strength and cohesion of their arguments, the depth of their scholarly inquiry, and their savviness in presenting complex information to a general academic audience. To satisfy each of these complex categories within a single piece of writing is no small task. The papers published here represent the best of the Scholars Program: intellectual curiosity, scholarly depth, and communicative innovation.
This journal represents a collaborative project involving students, faculty, and staff throughout each phase of its production. Students from all Scholars seminars were eligible to submit their work. Submissions were anonymized and ranked by a team of reviewers that included upper year students from the utmONE Scholars Program and faculty from the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy. In each case, student writers received ongoing support from faculty and staff from submission through to publication.
This journal serves as a platform for first-year student writers to showcase their remarkable work. This is deeply gratifying work, and we hope you enjoy reading the papers as much as we have enjoyed watching these young writers develop their ideas.