Cat’s Cradle DisentangledStòras Beò: Catrìona

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Guthan nan Eilean - Island Voices on Twitter

The Island Voices project allows itself some geographical and linguistic latitude on Twitter. This was particularly evident this month with three separate multilingual threads exploring links and languages beyond the Hebrides. For fear of entanglement they’re collected here to ease reference. If you’re not a Twitter fan you can just click on the wee bird in the images below and then “Show this thread” to access each string independently.

The first (July 15th) recollects posts and recordings documenting the “Mediating Multilingualism” project, led by UHI’s Language Sciences Institute (LSI) with Indian partners, in which Island Voices approaches to community-based video-making are featured.

The second thread (July 23rd) stays with the LSI, focusing in on its development of a multilingual online presence in support of its international projects. This is exemplified both on its own webpages (in four different languages) and through its experimental use of Clilstore (a platform developed in tandem with Island Voices) with a number of new languages.

And lastly, the third thread (July 27th) uses snatched video of cricket in Queen’s Park, Glasgow, to introduce a summer reading list, for those with an interest in social history, that travels “Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers” from “A School in South Uist” to “A Corner of a Foreign Field” – with an intriguing link to ship-jumping in London and New York that brings “Stòras Beò nan Gàidheal” into a multimodal matrix. There may be more than one way of joining the dots…

Visitors to the annual Ceòlas summer school in South Uist, among many others with an interest in Gaelic cultural and educational activities, will need little introduction to Catriona MacIntyre. Here she is talking to Archie Campbell for UHI’s project, Stòras Beò nan Gàidheal.

Here, in the first part, Catrìona, from Iochdar in South Uist, recalls happy schooldays, first in Iochdar, then Daliburgh, and finishing in Fort William on the mainland. Having decided on a teaching career she trained in Glasgow, before returning to South Uist for her first job, in Lochboisdale, where she used her Gaelic extensively. On marrying she moved back to Fort William where she worked in a school for twenty years, noticing the close island and Gaelic connections of many in the town and the school.

A Clilstore transcript is available here: http://multidict.net/cs/8233

In the second part, Catrìona talks about her seminal involvement in the development of Gaelic Medium Education in Lochaber and neighbouring areas, together with the growth of the Fèis movement at the same time. She enjoyed her peripatetic lifestyle. On retiring home to South Uist, she was involved in supply teaching, and has become closely involved with Ceòlas, the summer school and associated activities, and been involved in teaching Gaelic to adults, for example, for Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

A Clilstore transcript is available here: http://multidict.net/cs/8235