As every year, the Directorate of Research and Doctorates (DID, as its Spanish acronyms) of the Universidad del Desarrollo organizes activities to improve writing, reading and oral skills in English which are dictated by the PhD in Multicultural Education, Educational Evaluation and Master in Linguistics of the University of Colorado, Anne Bliss. The teacher is a visiting researcher since 2015, who conducts workshops and writing activities and presentations in English for researchers, academics and graduate students.

On this occasion, Dr. Bliss developed the “Writing Workshop” activity from May 13 to 17, which aimed to provide postgraduate students with a basic “plan of attack” for the exchange of ideas, planning, design, writing and the presentation of proposals for a variety of purposes related to research. In this workshop, five students of the PhD Program in Social Complexity Sciences of the CICS participated: María Paz Reveau, Gabriela Fajardo, Yessica Herrera, Víctor Márquez and Hugo Contreras.

Following the instructions given by the researcher, the students worked and developed individual and group projects, which were presented on the last day of work in front of professors from different UDD’s faculties: Mauricio Apablaza from Government, Gabriel Reyes from Psychology and Andrés Klein from Medicine. The final objective of the teachers’ deliberation is to send the presentations to an internal UDD contest to carry out a 18-month project with funding of 5 million chilean pesos.

Prior to this activity with the students, Dr. Bliss met with academics from different programs for a week, in order to review the English language of their projects and articles. In this way, the researchers had the opportunity to receive effective feedback for a correct use of the language in their work, prior to being presented in various competitions, congresses and international scientific journals.