November EC Meeting 2019

34

Members’ discounts at the hotel.

A great £85 for two nights plus freebies deal has been offered to affiliates’ members, we hope this can be advertised widely.

35

'Piston, Pen & Press' –

The following report of the project we are partners to with Manchester University has been sent by Michael Sanders who also proposes joint work to develop our history programme. - pleased to report a successful one-day conference was held at the Finnish Labour Museum in Tampere in June. - our first exhibition ‘Literature in the Factories & Mills’, opened at the Jute Museum @Verdant Works on 17 August 2019. It will move to Dundee Central Library in November. We've also produced a free poetry pamphlet to accompany the exhibition - which can be downloaded from our website. - our second exhibition ‘Literature in the Mines’ opened at North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre in Motherwell on 30 August 2019. It is combined with a great exhibition on local Lanarkshire writers, ‘Rhyme and Reason’. This exhibition will move to the Scottish National Mining Museum in spring 2020. You can pick up a free poetry booklet at the exhibition, or download it from the ‘Poetry Anthologies’ page. These exhibitions will be accompanied by talks and musical performances by our partners. At North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre and the Scottish National Mining Museum, you will also be able to attend a reading from the play written for ‘Piston, Pen & Press’, about Lanarkshire miners, by playwright and project partner Martin Travers, ‘A Daurk Maiter.’ In spring-summer 2019 we have worked on creating three free online courses, led by the University of Strathclyde and hosted on FutureLearn. These ‘Working Lives’ MOOCs explore the history of railway workers, coal miners, and textile factory workers in the long nineteenth century. We filmed at the National Railway Museum, the Scottish National Mining Museum, the National Coal-Mining Museum for England, the Big Pit National Mining Museum in South Wales, Quarry Bank Mill, New Lanark, Stanley Mills and Verdant Works, including in sections of these museums not open to the public. The MOOCs will run in 4 week blocks, starting with ‘Working Lives on the Railway’, from the end of September 2019. Participation is free. MOOCS: Massive Open Online courses

Here's the link to our website - which gives further details

https://www.pistonpenandpress.org

One last thing, I wonder if the MOOC might provide a way forward for delivering the working-class history/culture strand of our educational aspirations? There might be the possibility of bidding for some money to do something along these lines.

35

Nationalised Coal Industry study.

This project is going extremely well with many oral interviews having been done in 8 coalfields to look at the impact of coal nationalisation. The project has attracted international interest amongst

8