For the second year, ITAM’s Teaching Seminar was held for university faculty. This year the theme was the importance of written communication in higher education. The provost, Dr. Alejandro Hernandez, who has been instrumental in propelling the new writing program at ITAM, opened the seminar. During his welcome message, he spoke of the value it brings to our institute to offer the first writing program of this kind in Latin America and the pivotal effect that the development of strong skills in written communication will have on the academic and professional life of the students.

About 90 teachers from all of the institute’s academic departments attended the lectures prepared by the Academic Department of Languages. The talks covered subjects such as ITAM’s writing program and it’s first subject, Written Communication Strategy (Estrategias de Comunicación Escrita); persuasion, metaphor and science; learning by summarizing; various unacceptable errors; and the selection and evaluation of homework: what for, when, and how.

Dr. Suzanne Lane, Director of the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave the keynote speech. She talked about current communication in academia and in the professional world, as well as the latest approaches in the teaching of writing and their effect on student learning.