Aye Write! Writing in Scots Workshops
Mitchell Library
Glasgow
11am - 3pm
£7/£6 concs
Three workshops on Writing in Scots from the Association of Scottish Literary Studies Language Committee to be presented in the Burns’ Room in the Mitchell Library.
11am Workshop led by James McGonigal who has recently completed a project on the use of Scots and Scottish texts with immigrant and asylum-seeking children in P6-7. He will be exploring this theme in the workshop. James McGonigal is Head of Language and Literature in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow, responsible for initial teacher education in English and the Modern Languages for primary and secondary schools. He taught in urban and rural secondary schools for fourteen years, and subsequently in colleges of education. He has produced national curriculum materials for teachers, particularly in the areas of language education, classroom talk and learning disabilities, combining this with critical work on modernist poetry and creative and editorial work in Scots and English.
12 noon Workshop on Dictionary Resources for writing in Scots led by Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson is Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries, the charitable body responsible for maintaining and enhancing the Dictionary of the Scots Language (the online dictionary which combines The Scottish National Dictionary and A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue), for creating the National Word Collection and for producing thoroughly researched smaller dictionaries. As well as looking at what resources are available, she will discuss how these resources are created. She teaches Scots at the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute and is an Honorary Fellow of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh where she taught Scots for many years.
2pm Workshop by Robert Wilson. His workshop, 'Rab and Rabbie, Writing Poetry in Scots in the 21st Century', will explore issues in Burns' poetry which are equally relevant today. Rab Wilson is the Robert Burns Writing Fellow in Reading Scots for Dumfries and Galloway and is a one of Scotland’s most promising poets. His major work to date is his ‘owersettin’, in Scots, of the famous medieval Persian work ‘The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam’.