This project has been about establishing an informal educational program and curriculum on art and creativity with an emphasis on developing competencies in relation to the creative process, creative and artistic expression and entrepreneurship in the creative sector and as a general ability to realize your ideas. The project has been a collaboration between six educational and artistic institutions from various levels in the educational systems in Scandinavia.“What would an extraordinary, artistic, experimental education look like that would provide the students with a strong foundation for their further artistic practice and life in general?” was the question that guided the development of this program and the various forms it has taken and will take. This question does not seem to lose it’s relevance.What has been developed is a program that aims to give young adults the space for creative and artistic learning and experimentation that will help them in a process of finding their direction further on, whether this be further education or into work-life. This project has focused on developing a new kind of curriculum which can be transferred and applied in various contexts. But such a curriculum is not just an intellectual endeavor and in order to base this development on practical experiences, the activities in the project have been concerned with running three test programs at the LungA School in Seyðisfjörður and through this develop both the curriculum and develop a school in which this curriculum is applied. The project has had several components such as: - Three prototype programs with a total of approx. 45 students. These programs are to test out components for the final curriculum and design and to slowly implement the new curriculum at the LungA School. Each prototype has been full-length which means 12 weeks each.- Workshops done at the LungA School by the collaborative partners. This has been done so that the partners would get an intricate understanding of the LungA School in order to qualify the collaboration on the curriculum development. This has also been done so that the collaborators would be able to understand the foundations of the LungA School and the new curriculum in order to bring that knowledge and understanding with them back to their respective institutions. - Curriculum development workshops with collaborative partners. This has been done both while they have been in Seyðisfjörður and during visits from the LungA School to the partner institutions. - Ongoing evaluation, sparring and conversations with the partners on status on the project and concerning the development of the program and curriculum. - An ongoing communication department at the LungA School, documenting everything that has taken place during the test programs and communicating this to a wider audience through text, images, sound and video. This has also served as a way of promoting the LungA School programme and therefore to put focus on this kind of educational program. - Dissemination seminar in Seyðisfjörður where the new curriculum and the findings from the project was presented to an international audience. Generally, the activities of the project has led us much further than we could have hoped for and the quality of the collaborations has far exceeded our expectations. We have been able to both build a very solid foundation for the LungA School and develop a strong, coherent curriculum and approach to running creative educational programs in general. The impact of the project on both local and national scale has also been greater than we could have hoped for which means that we, locally, have become more and more integrated into the life and culture in the community of Seyðisfjörður and that we are already starting to develop another program which will hopefully start up in the fall of 2017 so we will expand with another 10-12 students pr. program. On a national scale we have been in an ongoing dialogue with most of the parties in parliament which led to a decision in parliament in early 2016 concerning the development of legislation for Folk High schools in Iceland. So in this way we have both been pushing for the recognition of informal education and we have become a test platform for this development process which will begin 2017.The response on the program and the curriculum from both external collaborators and program participants has been overwhelmingly positive and we have started engaging in conversations with a range of educational institutions within the field of arts throughout Iceland and Europe that are showing interest in understanding more about how we are working and designing our programs. The field of arts education as well as the file of informal education are in a process of enormous change these years and many of them want to move in the direction of doing things similarly to what we have been exploring in this project, so the dissemination of the project continues.

Active ice-covered volcanoes present considerable danger to society due to their explosive, ash-rich nature and the potential to generate destructive glacial outburst floods. However, the ability to monitor their activity is complicated by the difficulty in discriminating volcanic and glacial earthquakes as they can appear identical in the seismic record. My recent work in Chile and Alaska has demonstrated how newly developed waveform correlation approaches could help distinguish between glacial and volcanic seismicity. The multi-disciplinary SIGMA project will apply these methods to an exceptional seismic dataset in Iceland while developing a new automatic classification software. The work plan includes creating a new micro-seismic catalogue in which events will be characterised as glacial or volcanic using statistical analysis tools. Furthermore, glacial events will be used to calculate subglacial hydraulic properties, an important requirement for modelling future glacier behaviour. The 3 targets areas across the Vatnajökull ice cap include some of the most active volcanic and glacial regions in Iceland. Under the supervision of Dr Magnússon and Prof. Aðalgeirsdóttir at the University of Iceland, and Dr Jónsdottír during a secondment at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, I will receive exceptional training in research and transferable skills that will allow me to fulfill my future career goal of becoming a leader in geophysical monitoring of volcanoes and other natural hazards. Being based at the University of Iceland will mean joining a world-leading research institute in geosciences with opportunities to develop internal and international multidisciplinary collaborations. Ultimately, the project will help future activity assessments at the most active volcanoes in Iceland and in turn, reduce their risk to local populations and infrastructure, while contributing towards the long-term EU target of ensuring a more resilient society against natural hazards.

The EILisCh project will focus on linguistic variation and change in Icelandic syntax and it will be the most ambitious attempt so far to model, understand, and explain Individual Lifespan Change in linguistic behavior, drawing on recent advances in sociolinguistics, quantitative syntactic theory, clinicial linguistics, as well as resources recently made available by Language Technology. The project will harness these ingredients and the experience of the PI and the infrastructure present in his Language and Technology lab in order to facilitate a new kind of a large scale project that will yield substantial progress towards important empirical, theoretical, and methodological goals, as well as benefits for society. I will track hundreds of Members of Parliament via their speeches over their entire political career and interview dozens of current and former MPs to establish an even deeper profile of how they use language. Carrying this research out in Iceland is important because of the unusually easy access that researchers have to public figures in this small language community. The kind of precise modelling that I describe in this proposal is only possible in a project that builds on substantial pre-existing Language Resources and takes place in a setting where extensive knowledge of the linguistic data and the required technological tools is present. My Language and Technology lab at the University of Iceland is the right place to do this and the experience I have gathered in several previous projects will be essential for my team’s success. However, the scale of this enterprise is beyond the means of national funding agencies in Iceland; thus I turn to the ERC, so that together we can redefine the state of the art in the study of Individual Lifespan Change.

The diversity and complexity of students, fast pace of life, constant changes and huge amount of information place increasing demands on the teachers (who represent different generation) to provide effective pedagogy and instruction, validate and incorporate students’ knowledge and experience in the learning process (which differs from but also greatly contributes to the knowledge and experience of teachers) and thus create inclusive, healthy, welcoming, productive, collaborative, ‘making mistakes is ok’ climate in the classroom. To meet these demands teachers have to adopt new professional practices, skills and competences, as well as revisit their mindsets as personalities, professionals and citizens. At the same time learners have to assume more responsibility for their own learning, be more skillful and vocal in presenting their ideas. Both teachers and students have to improve their ability and motivation to collaborate in making the choices in terms of what, when and how to include in the teaching-learning process.Contemporary students are characterized by being autonomous, independent and self-confident, but at the same time they often lack collaboration and self-expression skills. The majority of schools still offer mostly traditional teaching where all students have the same tasks and work individually according to the teacher’s prescriptions. In order to make learning more effective, interesting and appealing to the learner we have to find answers to the questions “How to make students motivated and interested in what is happening in the classroom? How to incorporate students’ knowledge and skills in the learning process? How to promote student engagement and desire to be responsible for their own learning? What is the teachers’ role and what competences and characteristics should they possess in order to promote students’ and their own learning? How to connect learning in the classroom with the outside world – events and processes in local community and globally? How to move towards more meaningful and purposeful learning?”Aim: to explore the experience and best practice of partner countries in supporting active engagement of learners (both students and teachers) in planning, implementation and evaluation of the learning process at school and beyond in order for them to become co-creators of their own learning within collaborative learning process.Key aspects to be explored: self-led learning learning, an engaged classroom, collaboration with shared responsibility for decision making and results, providing open and immediate feedback, education technologies, Learning to learn and Cultural awareness and expression competences, interdisciplinary approach, Teacher as a learner, facilitator, supporter, guide, coach, mentor, nurturer, etc.Objectives:•To identify examples of learner engagement in co-creation of their own learning in partner countries;•To find out what are the obstacles to engaging learners in the creation and implementation of the learning process;•To collect examples of best practices where teachers are using new approaches/pedagogies, the latest technology, space, etc. to steer pupils/learners towards more meaningful and purposeful learning;•To explore what kind of support is required for teachers to be able to ensure student-led learning;•To elaborate a podcast series with instructional support materials for educators on how to implement new pedagogies in their practice. Target audiences:Direct: •Staff from project partner organisations who directly or indirectly work with schools;•Educators hosting learning visits in all partner countries;•Educators benefiting from the project results (i.e. Intellectual output, multiplier events, etc).Indirect:•Learners;•Educational community.Expected impact:•Increased capacity of partner institutions and their staff to provide professional development of educators;•Developed series of podcasts with supporting materials for school leaders and teachers on how to implement new pedagogies in their practice;•Raised educators’ awareness, increased knowledge and deepened understanding of multiple modes of instruction and learning that support active engagement of learners in all stages of the learning process and different contexts;•Presented practical applications of new approaches in teaching and learning;•Expanded partnerships and professional networks of educators and educational organisations in partner countries and across Europe.Nowadays all European countries face similar challenges in education systems and actively look for diverse solutions to react to fast changing situation in all spheres of life. Many school education systems struggle to respond to the profound and complex changes our societies and economies are undergoing. The need for innovative approaches and help for schools in adapting to the changing context, including the digital era and the increasing diversity among learners, is obvious.