Beyond the Classroom: Research and Teaching Intersect at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy

Established in 2020, the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) quickly gained recognition at U of T Mississauga for fostering learning environments where students thrive. Through their many courses, workshops, consultations, and programs, ISUP helps students develop foundational academic skills. 

But while teaching is a core part of its mission, ISUP is also a vibrant hub for research and innovation. 

The Institute is home to faculty in the teaching and tenure stream who conduct research that is recognized nationally and internationally. Topics range from writing skill and program assessment to the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom to pedagogy, social justice in education, translingualism, and more.  

“The way research emerges here is unique,” says Christopher Eaton, Associate Director, Research at ISUP and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream.

“Our classroom pedagogy often leads to research about teaching and learning in higher education. Because of this approach, our research is often put into action before our peer-reviewed publications are out.”

Eaton explains that ISUP’s integrated approach to teaching and research allows both to inform and strengthen each other. Faculty have successfully secured internal grants to launch research projects, and both undergraduate and graduate students benefit by being actively involved from the ground up. 

"It’s not just about teaching,” he adds. “It’s how teaching merges with research to build student and faculty portfolios in tandem.”

Curious about the research coming out of ISUP? Read on to discover some of the exciting projects underway — and how they're shaping teaching and learning here at UTM and beyond.

Jump ahead to learn about:

• Writing Pedagogy & Student Skill Development
• Translingualism, Critical Language Awareness & Discourse
• Artificial Intelligence & Literacy
• Social Justice & Equity Pedagogy
• Community Collaborations & Partnerships

Meet This Year’s Faculty Research Excellence Award Recipient 

The ISUP Faculty Research Excellence Award celebrates faculty members’ outstanding contributions to research on teaching and learning. 

In 2024-25, it was awarded to Sheliza Ibrahim, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream. Prof. Ibrahim is an international scholar working in collaboration with universities, mostly across the Caribbean, to explore professional development for mathematics and science educators, and pedagogical design in the teaching and learning of STEM subjects.

Her research centres around university pedagogy, with a focus on inclusive and antiracist pedagogies. Learn more about her work here.

Group & Individual Projects

Writing Pedagogy & Student Skill Development

Many ISUP research projects focus on how students develop their writing skills. This research includes longitudinal studies of student writing skills, writing program assessments, and investigations of how writing pedagogies impact student learning.

1. Tyler Evans-Tokaryk has been editing First-Year Composition in Canada: Faculty and Student Perspectives on ‘Writing about Writing’, a 14-chapter collection that provides an overview of the formation and early years of ISUP.

   Featuring essays by senior administrators, faculty, and students, this collection offers unprecedented insight into the process of creating robust writing support for undergraduate students at a mid-sized urban university in Canada. Coming soon from Parlor Press!

2. Sarah Seeley, Oguzhan Tekin, and Tyler Evans-Tokaryk recently published a special issue of Discourse and Writing/Redactologie journal. “Teaching Academic Writing in Canada” is comprised of nine articles that emphasize Canadian approaches to academic writing that take up interrelated pedagogical circumstances and exigencies.

3. Laura Taylor, Sheila Batacharya, and Ji-young Shin are evaluating the effectiveness of the ISP100 Writing for University and Beyond “Writing Check-In,” a writing diagnostic. 

   The project, titled “Investigating writing development and needs in university foundational writing courses from a corpus linguistics perspective: Bridging assessment and writing courses,” will allow them to measure writing development in ISP100 and ISP010 Basics of Writing in English (BoWiE) by examining 700 samples of the Writing Check-In. 

4. Oguzhan Tekin is conducting an ongoing research project on the role ISP100: Writing for University and Beyond plays in first-year student’s writing development and sense of belonging — which is usually associated with student retention.

Translingualism, Critical Language Awareness & Discourse

ISUP research often examines the role that literate activities, rhetoric, discourse, and linguistic repertoires have on student learning. 

1. Zhaozhe Wang’s recent book, Doing Difference Differently: Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances, ethnographically documents the multifaceted everyday literate activities of Chinese international students — challenging the myth of linguistic and cultural differences reified in institutional discourses of diversity.

2. Janine Rose, Zhaozhe Wang, and Mark Blaauw-Hara recently published a textbook chapter called “Students’ Languages Matter: Translingualism and Critical Language Awareness” in the 2025 edition of Thinking About Writing. The chapter highlights how translingualism and critical language awareness can help students draw on their full linguistic repertoires in academic writing, challenging monolingual norms and fostering more inclusive, empowering literacy practices.

3. Oguzhan Tekin is studying intergroup attitudes and contact between international students and the host community. The project explores mutual attitudes, perception of threat in multiple dimensions, and the quality and quantity of contact between international students in English-medium universities and the francophone host community in Montreal. This research has yielded two manuscripts: one published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024 and another now under review for Comparative and International Education journal.

Artificial Intelligence & Literacy

ISUP researchers are developing an understanding of how artificial intelligence is affecting student learning and skill development.

1. Chaoran Wang and Zhaozhe Wang recently published an article in Computers and Composition journal, in which they ask how posthumanism can reframe AI-mediated literary practices — and what it means for cultivating AI literacy in language and literacy education. 

   Wang and Wang explore these questions through a case study of two multilingual undergraduates’ meaning-making and negotiation with AI in a writing classroom.

2. Christopher Eaton published a paper in Double Helix: A Journal of Writing and Critical Thinking. “The AI reading conundrum and its implications for pedagogy” considers the impact of AI summarizers on reading practices in postsecondary writing classrooms. The article starts a conversation about the influence of AI tools on reading, writing, and critical thinking practices.

3. Chaoran Wang and Zhaozhe Wang published a research article in the Journal of Second Language Writing.Looking at two first-year writing classes, they studied how students used ChatGPT to support their writing — and revealed their own critical AI literary practices.

4. Sarah Seeley and Michael Cournoyea interviewed faculty across four multidisciplinary departments at UTM for their article, “I’m Not Worried about Robots Taking Over the World. I Guess I’m Worried about People: Emoting, Teaching, and Learning with Generative AI.” 

   Published this fall in Teaching & Learning Inquiry journal, the paper offers a holistic snapshot of educators’ emotional responses and includes recommendations for increasing pedagogical conversation and rethinking foundational skills. 

5. Suqing Liu, Christopher Eaton, Bogdan Simion, and Michael Liut collaborated on a new study that examined the results of a small language model designed for AI courses at UTM. The project features results from students receiving feedback on their projects from AI and human sources. “A comparative study of technical writing feedback quality: Evaluating LLMs, SLMs, and humans in computer science topics” is currently under review.

6. Erin Vearncombe and Cara Violini are editing special issue of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. “The Present and Future(s) of Writing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence/Le Présent et le(s) Futur(s) de la Rédaction à l'ère de l'Intelligence Artificielle” considers the diverse impacts that technologies of artificial intelligence are having and will have on academic and professional writing, its teaching, and practice. Not only will these technologies change students' writing processes and strategies, but the relationship of writer and reader — and even the fundamental framing of writer itself — will change.

   Published research in this issue will explore topics such as the ethics of writing, evaluative judgment, prompt engineering, writing strategies and multilingual writers, pedagogies of AI use, and generative AI as assistive technology. Coming soon!

Social Justice & Equity Pedagogy 

Equity, diversity, and inclusion are important dimensions of ISUP’s research. Several projects highlight the important work that faculty are doing on EDI initiatives.

1. Nelesi Rodrigues has written a chapter for the edited collection Rhetorica Rising: Feminist Rhetorical Methods for Social Change. In it, she examines the movement pedagogies of Ananya Dance Theatre, a transnational feminist company based in Minnesota and considers how their multimodal approaches to meaning-making could inform research and teaching in rhetoric and composition. 

2. Sheliza Ibrahim is the primary educator in a partnership between SEE UTM (Support, Engage, Empower) and the Peel District School Board; she co-developed a research project that examines Black and Caribbean belonging and identity at UTM. The project has since branched off into other collaborations:

• Jessica Silver, Kwame Diko, Smyrna Wright, and Ibrahim are researching the collaborative approaches used to create Access Programming for marginalized youth. This work was recently presented at the Canadian Association of College and University Students Services (CACUSS) conference. A chapter on this research is currently in development.
• Nelesi Rodrigues, Janine Rose, and Ibrahim have recruited SEE UTM student alumni and other UTM undergraduate students that identify as Black who are participating in the Caribbean and Black Writing Collective (CBWC). They’re analyzing the CBWC impact on historically marginalized student from Black, Caribbean, African and Latina backgrounds, and researching the ways in which space has been created so that they can benefit from a university experience that is culturally responsive to their needs. 

3. Sheliza Ibrahim, Sheila Batacharya, and Wanja Gitari were awarded funding by the Black, Indigenous, and/or Racialized Scholar/Research Grant Program to support their project, “Salient Social Justice Moments while Teaching During the Pandemic: Experiences from a University Context.” The study examines instructor narratives to understand how faculty responded to social justice issues and EDI initiatives from 2020 to present across diverse disciplines.

Community Collaborations & Partnerships

ISUP has many notable research collaborations that connect researchers across disciplines and departments.

1. The UTM Working Group on Threshold Knowledge in University Pedagogy is establishing a hub of reflection and research that reimagines undergraduate students’ learning experiences through the lens of threshold concepts. Research interests that guide the group are the identification of threshold concepts within and across disciplines; curricular design based on threshold concepts; and the direct teaching and learning of threshold concepts to students.

2. Sheliza Ibrahim is a member of the Canada Caribbean Institute and co-investigator of the STEM Professional Development Series for Jamaican Faculty: International Education Initiatives. The international research project is in partnership with Brock University and the University of Technology, Jamaica, and the team is investigating how professors and lecturers in STEM and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) disciplines develop their pedagogical practices and engage research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). 

3. Tyler Evans-Tokaryk is co-principal investigator on a mixed-methods study at the University of Dar es Salaam. As the first longitudinal study of writing transfer in East Africa, it seeks to understand the degree to which students who speak English as an additional language transfer skills and knowledge learned in a first-year communication skills course to other contexts. This research will also help them understand how these students develop their writing skills throughout their undergraduate degree.

4. Jayne Baker, Alysia deMelo, and Tyler Evans-Tokaryk are conducting research on recruiting student participants for Scholarship of Teaching of Learning (SoTL) research. They look at the differences between the students who consent and those who refuse to participate in SoTL research, as well as what informs their decision-making process. Findings were presented at the 2025 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference.

5. Sarah Seeley, David Gerstle (UTM Library), and Marc Laflamme (Chemical and Physical Sciences) are researching the challenges facing scientists who are training science writers. Their paper, which will be submitting to the International Journal of Science Education, is based on qualitative interviews with science faculty in CPS. In it they identify a series of challenges to fostering deeper connections between science and written communication. 

6. Jordana Garbati created The Symbolic Communication Research Lab, which includes several current and past projects including: 

• Citizen Emoji: documents the non-digital use of emoji through publica collection of artifacts from around the world.
• Birding Emojis in Digital Writing Related to Ornithology: explores birding communities’ and associations’ use of emoji in their digital communications.
• Emoji Use in Teaching and Learning: a systematic literature review on emoji and teaching and learning.
• Emoji Use in Brand Communications: A Case Study of Luxury Companies: explored emoji use by luxury fashion brands on Instagram and the alignment of emoji use by brands and their followers.
• The Use of Emoji on X During the 2024 Super Bowl: explored the use of emoji (type, frequency, sentiment, function) on X during the 2024 Super Bowl.