Erasmus+ Key Action 1 Learning Mobility of Individuals is continually one of the most important scholarship schemes which enables our students and staff to get an international learning and teaching experience, therefore it has a remarkable and growing importance to our institution. Tallinn University has set the most important developmental goals in its Development Plan for 2015-2020. The mission of the university, to support the sustainable development of Estonia, is achieved through integration into the European education and research area. Hence, one of three main principles of activity the document states is that the university is international. More specifically, the goals in the internationalisation field are that the number of students who have studied abroad and the number of staff members with long-term international experience has increased. Therefore, participating in the Erasmus+ programme for Learning Mobility of Individuals is of crucial importance to fulfil the goals set. The objectives, which we set for the outgoing student mobility, were to fulfill the number of outgoing study mobilities applied for in the grant agreement. Additionally, we aimed also to increase the quality of the mobility experience. We had applied for 115 scholarships for the student mobility for studies and 25 scholarships for student mobility for traineeships. In addition 24 traineeship mobilities were applied for due to a high interest in traineeships by the students. We managed to send out 102 students for studies and 75 students for traineeships, so we exceeded our initial quantitative goal for training mobility by three times but unfortunately did not meet the goal for the study mobility. The overall students mobility number (studies and traineeship combined) was bigger by 51 participants compared to last year. The qualitative feedback regarding the overall satisfaction of the mobility experience was roughly the same as the previous year. We were also happy to see that the qualitative feedback regarding the competences of the trainees was in a lot of sections (significantly) higher than last year. It seems that the traineeships have a very positive impact on the students and their competences. It is worth pointing out that we have made the possibilities for exchange studies highly visible to all students and we have been training and tightening the cooperation of the network of Erasmus coordinators in the academic units. When it comes to incoming exchange students, participation in the Erasmus+ programme has helped a great deal to offer an internationalization at home experience for Tallinn University's own students as more than 10% of our student body is international (degree+exchange students). So TU's own students who for different reasons cannot be mobile themselves can get the benefits of learning in an international setting at home by attending the same lectures, seminars, participating the LIFE project (Interdisciplinary project), choirs, symphony orchestra and other social activities. We had applied for 130 grants for staff mobility. 70 scholarships for teaching and 60 scholarships for training. Our aim was to keep or/and increase the number of outgoing staff for teaching as our universities overall goal is to be international. Therefore it is highly important to send our teaching staff abroad, so that they can gain international teaching experiences and contacts for further collaborations. As it was mentioned in the 2016 project's report, Tallinn University Development Plan for 2015- 2020 states the following priorities: to develop new study programmes, apply interdisciplinarity in study programmes, develop joint programmes. Therefore we have supported more staff whose main aim of the mobility was related to these above-mentioned topics. In the end, 111 staff mobilities were carried out, 58 of them staff mobilities for teaching and 53 staff mobilities for training. Many of the staff training mobilities were connected with sharing experiences and getting know-how of how to implement interdisciplinary projects into Tallinn University study programmes. We didn’t reach the number of teaching and training mobilities but we encouraged the staff to apply for longer teaching and training periods. We managed to achieve the quantitative balance between teaching activities and training activities, which is a positive tendency. The number of teaching activities increased significantly. During the previous project period (2016) we financed only 19 teaching activities compared to 58 teaching activities in the current project. The qualitative feedback given by the staff was also very positive, 99.1% of all staff reported that they were very satisfied or rather satisfied with their mobility experience. Therefore, even if the quantitative objectives were not 100% met, we can conclude that the project has been successful.

This is a project for higher education student and staff mobility between Programme Countries and Partner Countries. Please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

Given colonial and imperial backgrounds on the history of many of the European powers, different geographical displacements and the lack of proper representation the Black community, and people of colour (PoC), are historically portrayed in a sarcastic, humorous and racist fashion in European textual and visual repertoire. One would assume that the traditions perpetuated by colonial powers in representation of otherness would be replicated in imperialist countries, but these attributes can also be seen in countries that have no slavery or colonial past. DEPICTNESS is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral project that lays in the in-between place of Translation studies and Semiotic studies (not to mention other relevant fields as Travel Writing and Comparative Literature). One of DEPICTNESS objectives is to analyse the works of Hergé (Belgian cartoonist) and Gori (Estonian caricaturist). Chosen images of both artists’ PoC characters will form the visual selection, while the phrases using petit nègre in the Hergé collection and its translations in Portuguese, Galician, English and Estonian will form the textual selection. Both selections will be analysed and compared to see how differently white and PoC characters are portrayed textually and visually by both artists; for the visual selection a Semiotics approach will be used, while for the verbal selection a postcolonial methodology applied to translation studies will analyse the implications of being described by an accent. Concerning this selection and the artists’ production, founded on Travel Writing theory, another objective of DEPICTNESS is to coin a travel writer category called the static traveller taking in consideration the analytical corpus of the project. The multi-comparative approach of DEPICTNESS plot imagery and textual selection in order to explore the representations made by Gori and Hergé.

The proposed project offers a new, pan-European intellectual history of the political imagination in the interwar period that places the demise of historicism and progressivism – and the emerging anti-teleological visions of time – at the center of some of its most innovative ethical, political and methodological pursuits. It argues that only a distinctively cross-disciplinary and European narrative can capture the full ramifications and legacies of a fundamental rupture in thought conventionally, yet inadequately confined to the German cultural space and termed “anti-historicism”. It innovates narratively by exploring politically and theoretically interlaced reinventions of temporality across and between different disciplines (theology, jurisprudence, classical studies, literary theory, linguistics, sociology, philosophy), as well as other creative fields. It experiments methodologically by reconstructing the dynamics of political thought prosopographically, through intellectual groupings at the forefront of the scholarly and political debates of the period. It challenges the sufficiency of the standard focus in interwar intellectual history on one or two, at most three (usually “Western” European) national contexts by following out the interactions of these groupings in France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – groupings whose members frequently moved across national contexts. What were the political languages encoded in the reinventions of time, and vice versa – how were political aims translated into and advanced through theoretical innovation? How did these differ in different national contexts, and why? What are the fragmented legacies of this rupture, disbursed in and through the philosophical, methodological and political dicta and dogmas that rooted themselves in post-1945 thought? This project provides the first comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the intellectual identity of Europe and its historicities.

The Lifelong Learning Strategy for Estonia envisions digital turn in formal and informal education, order to change the learning paradigm towards more self-directed, creative and collaborative learning. One-to-one computing, digital learning resources, semantic web tools, linked data applications and interoperable cloud computing services will be used to build and evaluate tailored educational opportunities for every learner. This will maximize each student’s self-actualization aspirations and role in the tomorrow’s society and adaptation of educational institutions in Estonia along the expectations of rapidly changing job market and European education space. It is also well aligned with the EU Education & Training 2020 strategic framework, which aims at transforming education to deliver better socio-economic outcomes in the long term. Hence change in the approach to learning is needed in Estonia as well as across Europe, as teaching the skills needed in the 21st century demand creativity, entrepreneurial approaches and evidence-based policies at all levels and types of education. This in turn requires teaching methods and learning environment that considers each learner’s individual and social development and is tailored to his/her needs and capabilities. Latest developments in cognitive and developmental psychology enhanced by the innovations in the ICT sector show a strong potential for scalable applications to flexible and personalized approach to teaching. Current project together with the new ERA Chair holder specifically addresses the move towards implementing formative assessment method in schools, which in practice aims at supporting individual learning and development curve of the learner by evaluating personal progress.