The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education By Michael McIn ...

revive the Gaelic language through nonformal and formal education. The scope of this study is necessarily limited by the constraints of time, funding, and opportunity, but which include analyses of documents such as the 2005 Gaelic Language Act passed by the Scottish parliament, the National Plan for Gaelic, and other laws pertaining to Gaelic education that affect the Scottish Council on Education and other public institutions. The chapter couches the analyses from the perspective of the worldwide language revival movement, taking note of such minority language rights theorists as Fishman (1968, 1972, 1976, 1989, 1991) and discussing the Gaelic revival movement within the context of other similar, sometimes historical, efforts.

In addition, adhering to Patton's (2002) dictum that we cannot fully understand a “program without personally experiencing it,” (p. 262) I will recount some of my firsthand observations of the Gaelic revival as expressed through nonformal and formal education events in which I have taken part and where the revival efforts are currently taking shape; I include my observations of the education/revival experience at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye in Scotland—the first and only Gaelic-medium college—and accounts of interviews with students and educators there.

Through interviews, I sample the views of participants in the Gaelic revival, a group that includes students, educators, and other interested parties. These observations are made within the naturalistic tradition as described by Lincoln and Guba (1985), Creswell (1998), Stringer (1999), and Patton (2002). The naturalistic tradition emphasizes studying real-world situations as they unfold naturally. The interviews are open ended and only semistructured, involving give-and-take between interviewer and interviewee, and are coded to generate a description of settings, people, categories, and themes and to develop a coherent narrative of my findings (Creswell, 2003). The names of the participants are withheld to ensure confidentiality. I frame these interviews with full descriptions that convey the reality of the experiences lived by the participants and clarify my personal biases through self-reflection and self-disclosure. Where appropriate, I include negative, discrepant, or opposing viewpoints.