Aung San Suu Kyi's Reith Lecture and the Write Team: Finding a voice, creative writing, and social media

Yesterday I sat on a panel at the conclusion of the Write Team conference, speaking on the theme of engaging students through creative writing (I’d been invited for my knowledge of student engagement through Learning Futures, not because I know anything about teaching creative writing).

On the way into work this morning, I listened to a podcast of Aung San Suu Kyi’s first Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4. For those who don’t know, Aung San Suu Kyi is the leader of Burma’s main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, and she spent most of the past decade under house arrest. She recorded the lecture in secret.

What draws the conference and lecture together in my mind is the importance of being given – or seizing – a voice. The Write Team programme focuses specifically on what they call ‘invisible pupils’ who neither disrupt nor engage, and are easy to overlook in the classroom. Many of these children have found their voices through their work with the Write Team, and been transformed by it.

Just hearing Suu Kyi’s voice, smuggled out of Burma by the BBC, made it obvious why the Burmese Junta has taken such pains to silence her: she is both emotionally compelling and intellectually lucid, and the combination is incredibly powerful.

This brings me to a final point about voice. Late in her lecture, Suu Kyi made an observation that surprised me. Comparing this spring’s revolution in Tunisia to Burma’s failed 1988 uprising, she noted two differences between the two:

The first difference was that the Tunisian soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators, while soldiers in Burma felt no such compunction.

The second, and – she believed – probably more important distinction was that the Tunisian protesters could use the internet to communicate with each other, and with the rest of the world. The world watched, listened to, and read the Tunisian revolution. Burma, by contrast, is almost completely silent (this comes at about 12min 13sec in the lecture).

I tend to talk up social media, sometimes over-enthusiastically. But Aung San Suu Kyi’s lecture drives home the point that it really could transform the world. Indeed, it has already begun to do so.