Incoming UTM students, check your email for your invitation to apply to a utmONE Scholars Seminar. Application deadline is June 24th, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET. A list of commonly-asked application questions can be found in our FAQs.
Overview
utmONE Scholars Seminars are unique first-year seminar courses designed to provide a collaborative classroom experience for high-achieving students interested in developing their university-level research and communication skills.
There are many benefits to taking a utmONE Scholars Seminar including getting a head start on your research career by gaining hands-on academic research skills. The seminars also encourage a greater sense of belonging to the academic community, build confidence and communication skills, and provide an opportunity for students to engage with a theme that is relevant and interdisciplinary allowing for vibrant discussions from multiple perspectives.
Highlights of all utmONE Scholars Seminars
- Strong Academic Foundations: Each seminar is taught around an impactful theme. In addition to developing enhanced academic research skills, communication and writing skills, critical thinking skills, and collaboration skills, students will build global and social awareness by exploring a current topic in a global context.
- Supportive Classroom Experience: The seminar format (maximum 25 students per seminar) allows students to create meaningful relationships with their professor and classmates, and to experience academic dialogue and discussion in a collegial and safe environment.
- Focus on Collaboration: Experiential learning is embedded within the class meetings. Students collaborate on an enriching class project designed to examine multiple perspectives on the course theme. Every seminar is interdisciplinary in nature so students will meet and work with classmates from a variety of backgrounds and academic programs.
- Other Benefits of utmONE Scholars: Students who participate in a utmONE Scholars Seminar report that their experience had a positive impact on their academic success, helped them feel supported in their personal growth, increased their motivation in their other courses and developed their confidence in participating in class discussions.
Application Process
Applications are by invitation only. Incoming students with a CGPA of 90% or higher will receive an invitation to apply via email. Invitations are sent by email on a rolling basis starting in early May.
Scholars Seminars offered in 2025-26
UTM190H5: Sociolinguistics and Writing for Social Change
LEC0101
- Taught by Dr. Oguzhan Tekin
- Friday 12:00-2:00pm (Winter 2026)
- Distribution requirement for Social Science or Humanities
- Exclusions: All other utmONE Foundations and utmONE Scholars courses
How does language reflect and reproduce social inequalities, and how can writing be used to challenge them? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in sociolinguistics, including language variation, multilingualism, language and identity, standard language ideologies, and attitudes toward language varieties (e.g., accented speech, non-standard grammar or spelling). Students will examine how these issues play out in the speech communities they belong to or are interested in and in society more broadly.
In addition to learning how language works socially, students will strengthen their academic and public writing skills. The course culminates in a research project in which students investigate a sociolinguistic issue they care about, write an argumentative essay, and then transform it into a public genre (e.g., podcast, op-ed, infographic) tailored to a real-world audience.
UTM191H5: The Language of Science and Technology
LEC0101
- Taught by Dr. Laura Taylor
- Tuesday 9:00-11:00am (Winter 2026)
- Distribution requirement for Science or Social Science
- Exclusions: All other utmONE Foundations and utmONE Scholars courses
This course analyzes the rhetorical character of scientific writing and examines the role of writing and the use of language in the scientific process. The course invites top researchers and scholars from across the UTM community to give interactive presentations to Scholars students on current research projects that correspond to professors’ recently published journal articles or book chapters. Parts of these articles/chapters will be highlighted each week to examine the different components allowing students to assess professionally prepared texts and to develop a critical awareness of the resources of language employed in science and technology. Students will engage with their own writing at various points throughout the course, finding ways to ‘fit’ into specific discourse communities.
UTM191H5: Building Knowledge with Innovative Technologies (SCI, SSc)
LEC0102
- Taught by Dr. Chris Eaton
- Thursday 9:00-11:00am (Winter 2026)
- Distribution requirement for Science or Social Science
- Exclusions: All other utmONE Foundations and utmONE Scholars courses
This course will explore how people can leverage various technologies to support knowledge creation. Students will engage in multimodal epistemologies, which is a fancy way of saying that we will get hands-on with different tools and explore the various pathways they offer to create and communicate knowledge. In doing so, we will consider how viable certain technologies are to support learning, how/if they can be scaled to different learning contexts, how technologies can make knowledge accessible to various audiences (or not).
Our interactions will be framed by three modules: virtual reality, game-based learning, and podcast design. Each module will offer an opportunity to engage with and analyze a meaning-making tool (e.g., VR experiences) and/or an opportunity to design a teaching experience, such as a game or a podcast. Underpinning each module will be a discussion around the most hot-button technological topic of them all: generative AI and its impact on learning.
UTM192H5 Thinking Badly: Misinformation in the Information Age (SCI, HUM)
LEC0101
- Taught by Dr. Michael deBraga
- Monday 3:00-5:00pm (Winter 2026)
- Distribution requirement for Science or Humanities
- Exclusions: All other utmONE Foundations and utmONE Scholars courses
While information has always been a critical part of human endeavour, the nature of its delivery has historically been managed at a pace that has permitted more accurate vetting of news. Today, we live in an age where everyone can access information (almost) immediately. With digital media as a key driver of information exchange, the amount of information is such that managing its flow is virtually impossible.
By blending approaches from science and humanities, this course offers an engaging and interactive way to examine how information is gathered and delivered. This multi-disciplinary approach allows students to experience the relationship between the discipline that assesses and collects information (science) with the discipline that is responsible for communicating it to the world at large (humanities). The focus will be on not only how science news might be manipulated by those outside the discipline, but also how the scientific community can be held responsible for sowing the doubt and mistrust that contributes to the widely held belief that scientists lie to achieve some manipulative agenda. Through a series of case studies and discussion points, students will examine issues with scientific discourse and how the news media has exacerbated growing public mistrust. In effect, students will have a chance to explore some of society’s most pressing issues (e.g., climate change, medical communication) and apply them to their own research, thus immersing each student in these discussions and positioning them as contributors who can help resolve these problems.
UTM192H5: AI Ethics (SCI, HUM)
LEC0102
- Taught by Dr. Avery Slater
- Thursday 1:00-3:00pm
- Distribution requirement for Science or Humanities
- Exclusions: All other utmONE Foundations and utmONE Scholars courses
This course will examine the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the development of AI ethics. Using interdisciplinary methods that combine the history and philosophy of science and technology with those of the humanities, this course will explore how computer scientists, philosophers, writers, and AI historians describe and imagine the stakes involved in the development of AI. What ethics of AI will be needed to address the many social, political, and economic issues arising from these technologies?
View the recording of our "Meet the Profs" Info Session below:
Questions?
Please direct your questions to isup.advisor@utoronto.ca.