Writing Revolution

Call to mind a “typical” university class, and you may very well imagine rows of students in high-ceilinged lecture halls, absorbing knowledge from professors at the front of the room, and hoping they can remember it long enough for exams. But walk into the Department of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah, and you’ll find something radically different: undergrads co-authoring books with professors, presenting research at national conferences, and fundamentally reshaping how academia understands the very communities they come from.

Christie Toth, an associate professor in the department, has spent the last decade building Writing Studies Scholars, a unique program where transfer students from Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) study academic writing and become co-researchers investigating their own experiences with navigating the complicated terrain of four-year universities. Students receive scholarship support to make the leap from SLCC to the U affordable. She has worked alongside more than 65 undergraduate research collaborators since 2015, most of whom bring perspectives that traditional academic research has long overlooked.

“Transfer students are the experts on their own experience,” Toth explains. “I do better research, but also much better program development and teaching, if I’m continuously collaborating with them.”

Toth and her student co-authors have published a book with the National Council of Teachers of English, presented at dozens of regional and national conferences, and produced a special issue of Teaching English in a Two-Year College that includes a symposium piece written entirely by students. The research emerging from these collaborations is changing how the field understands community college and transfer student experiences.

Chloe Summers, a senior minoring in writing and rhetoric studies who aspires to work in publishing, has worked with Toth on research about SLCC students’ perspectives on what knowledge, qualities, and practices make community college literacy professors effective.

Deconstructing the Ivory Tower

Traditional models of undergraduate research often exclude the very students who might benefit most. As Toth notes, these programs historically catered to students “who were on campus a lot, didn’t have other jobs, could take temporary or unpaid work, didn’t need the academic credit.”

Toth’s approach flips this dynamic. Her collaborators include first-generation college students, parents, neurodivergent learners, and students from historically underrepresented backgrounds—precisely the populations who have been less likely to have been included in rigorous undergraduate research. Rather than asking these students to conform to existing academic structures, Toth has built a program that meets students where they are.

One such student is Henry Knudson, who works full time in the U’s Income Accounting department in addition to pursuing his bachelor’s degree. He was part of the Writing Studies Scholars and is now a key co-researcher with Toth’s speculative fiction project.

Speculative fiction (spec-fic for short), a broad genre that includes all sorts of non-mimetic fiction such as fantasy, sci-fi, and futuristic writing, is particularly interesting to Knudson. He came of age amidst an upswell in dystopian fiction with all its attendant despair, noting that while it was “not unjustifiable…things aren’t going super well…but it has a lethargy effect.” This project engages students to think specifically about barriers they have experienced in their own educational paths, then use spec-fic writing as a tool to imagine positive alternative futures.

Knudson was drawn to writing and rhetoric studies for the way faculty encouraged him to write as far as his imagination would go, unconstrained by genre or convention. He says, “When I am able to write, I’m open to more potential in my life than I would otherwise be able to dream. For me, writing is how I miss people who are gone, and it’s how I imagine a future that I struggle to think I deserve. It’s one of the ways I can really connect with the love for the people around me.”

The impact extends far beyond individual student success stories. When transfer students in Toth’s classes read work produced by other transfer students who became co-researchers, it “opens up possibilities and helps them see that it is a real thing that they can do.” The program creates what Toth calls a “crew,” building social ties between students that support the entire cohort in their academic pursuits in ways that individual mentorship never could.

The Ripple Effect

This collaborative approach is typical in writing and rhetoric studies. According to Jenny Andrus, professor and chair of the department, the faculty regularly involve students in research, particularly in what she calls “the study of student-ness.” Rachel Bryson has co-presented with students at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, one of the field’s premier gatherings. Maureen Mathison is working with an undergraduate and graduate student co-researcher, examining the influence of rhetoric on the transformation of a technical subdiscipline within writing studies. Students aren’t just learning about research; they’re actively participating in the scholarly conversations that shape their field.

The department’s commitment to student-centered pedagogy extends to its massive first-year writing program, which serves thousands of students annually across required composition courses. In Fall 2024 alone, there were 3,498 undergraduate students enrolled in writing and rhetoric studies classes. With class sizes capped at 27 or fewer, the program prioritizes human connection within learning communities. As Andrus puts it, “One of the most important things we do in writing is know our students.”

The small class sizes allow students to “actually make friends and feel like people, feel seen, feel recognized,” which Andrus points out are critical factors consistently linked to retention and academic success. For many first-year students, a writing class may be their only small discussion-based class, making it a crucial site for building the relationships that sustain college success.

In this context, the department’s emphasis on process, collaboration, and human connection takes on new significance as generative AI transforms how students approach writing. Rather than banning AI tools, some faculty are experimenting with what Andrus calls “AI-defeating pedagogy,” breaking writing assignments into process-based components that require sustained development of their ideas over time.

She says, “What I know from experience is that if you teach students process—how to come up with ideas, how to draft ideas, how to do research, how to revise—if you work on the content, if you work on making the argument, then as they go over and over and over their text (which is best practice), that sentence-level grammatical understanding and paragraph-level
technique comes on its own.” 

“Many of us use AI to teach invention,” Andrus notes, but the goal is helping students use writing as a tool to develop their own thinking, rather than outsourcing their intellectual engagement to AI. This approach seems to be reducing student anxiety around writing while preserving the cognitive and metacognitive benefits of truly working through the process.

Redefining Academic Value

What makes this model particularly striking is how it challenges fundamental assumptions about who creates knowledge and whose perspectives matter in academic research. Toth describes her favorite aspect of co-researching with undergraduates: “They are not beholden to the same audiences in the same ways that I am.” While she’s been trained to write for narrow academic audiences, her student collaborators push her toward accessibility and innovation.

“Students often don’t want to be academics,” she explains. “They push me to think about ways to write for a wider audience, push me to do the research in more poly-vocal ways.” Toth aims to create space for writing that “looks like them.”

This collaborative approach is producing genuinely novel scholarship. Toth is currently working on two book projects with undergraduate co-authors: one focusing on graduate education for future community college teachers, and another that uses speculative fiction to imagine “more hopeful futures for lifelong literacy learning.”

A Model for the Future

The department’s approach offers a compelling alternative to the increasingly transactional nature of higher education. By treating students as intellectual partners, writing and rhetoric studies faculty create the conditions for the kind of transformative learning that students are seeking.

The model is particularly important as higher education grapples with questions of access, fairness, and relevance. When transfer students who often face the greatest barriers to academic success become co-researchers investigating their own experiences, the resulting knowledge serves not just academic ends but community needs. From Toth’s perspective, these students often “appreciate the opportunity to speak back to a system that has sometimes caused harms and otherwise is just not built for them.”

As one student wrote to Andrus after taking a challenging discourse analysis course, the class helped her understand “what the effects of language were”—a recognition that writing isn’t just a skill but an exercise of power. Since, as Andrus puts it, “everybody writes, in every single field, all the time,” this kind of critical awareness becomes not just academic knowledge but a tool for navigating and potentially transforming the world. In an extraordinarily student-centered college, Andrus unequivocally states, “We make sure that we are teaching writing for the student. The student always comes first.”

The quiet revolution happening in writing and rhetoric studies isn’t just about better pedagogy or more inclusive research practices. It’s about reimagining what universities can be when they take seriously their commitment to student success, not just as measured by graduation rates or job placement, but as the development of students’ capacity to understand, critique, and reshape the world through words.