Kersti Lepajõe was elected the Director of the College of World Languages and Cultures of the UT
At the meeting of 29 October, the Council of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Tartu elected Kersti Lepajõe, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Estonian Language, as the Director of the College of World Languages and Cultures to be opened on 1 January 2015.
Lepajõe was encouraged to apply for the position of the director of the college to be opened by her work experience as a lecturer as well as a higher education official. “My applying for the post was certainly also motivated by an interesting opportunity to witness the creation of a new structural unit and shape its development taking into account the good academic traditions and current development directions of the University,” said the future director.
The new college is a structural unit, which brings together foreign language studies on Bachelor’s degree level as well as the Master’s programme for translation, but it will also be offering foreign language teaching to the students of all specialties taught at the University. “In the next few years, the college will develop into a centre for teaching and studying foreign languages, which will be dealing with all facets of the speciality, but also a public-facing institution that offers foreign language teaching and testing as well as translation services to everyone interested,” Lepajõe added.
The council valued Lepajõe’s clear financial strategy and management experience. Professor Margit Sutrop, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, said that Kersti Lepajõe’s strengths were her international work experience and the ability to see the challenges that the college is faced with in the wider social and international context. Lepajõe was elected as the director for five years.
Kersti Lepajõe was born in 1958. Her main areas of research have been text analysis, written communication and various methods of teaching of the above. In 1997, she defended her Magister Artiumi degree at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Tartu. In 2012, she was awarded a Doctorate Degree for defending her dissertation “Kirjand kui tekstiliik. Riigieksamikirjandite tekstuaalsed, retoorilised ja diskursiivsed omadused” (“Essay as a Type of Text. The Textual, Rhetorical and Discursive Characteristics of State Exam Essays”). She has studied further at the University of Jyväskyla, University of Helsinki, University of Oslo, etc.
Lepajõe has been working as a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy since 1989. Since 2010, she is a Programme Leader at the Department of Estonian and, since 2012, Senior Lecturer in Estonian Language. Lepajõe is a member of the Council and the Academic Affairs Committee of the Faculty of Philosophy and an alternate member of the Council of Pedagogicum since 2009. She has led several national programmes and been a member of working groups for preparation and development of curriculums in Estonia and abroad. Lepajõe has also worked as the Director of the Estonian Centre of the EU higher education development programme TEMPUS from 1997-2001 and as a Lecturer in Estonian Language at the University of Helsinki 2004-2008.
The College of World Languages and Cultures will be created at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Tartu on the basis of the Language Centre and the Institute of Germanic, Romance and Slavonic. Bringing teaching of foreign languages together in one single structural unit will make language studies and several other services (testing of language skills, development and verbal and written expression skills, translation) more easily accessible for the whole University and the Estonian public. According to the new curriculums, teaching will commence on 1 September 2015.
Further information: Kersti Lepajõe, future Director of the College of World Languages and Cultures of the University of Tartu, tel: 737 6127, 5165347, e-mail: kersti.lepajoe [ät] ut.ee.