Holocaust. She then revamped her curriculum using books like Anne Frank’s diary as her guide to combat intolerance and misunderstanding. Her students began recording their thoughts and feelings in their own diaries, eventually dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers.” Their stories became “The Freedom Writers Diary” which quickly climbed to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list.

BBy fostering an educational philosophy that valued and promoted diversity, she transformed her students’ lives. With Gruwell’s support, they chose to forego teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence in order to become aspiring college students, published writers, and citizens for change.

EErin Gruwell continues to ght for equality in education as a professor of practice with Bay Path University, as a Chapman University fellow, and by sharing her teaching practices with educators from around the world via Freedom Writer Teacher training institutes though the Freedom Writers Foundation. Gruwell and her students’ story became the basis for the 2007 feature lm, “Freedom Writers”, and the documentary, “Freedom Writers: Stories from the Heart”, which aired nationally on PBS in 2019. In September of 2019, “T“The Freedom Writers Diary” was republished with 20 new stories to celebrate the book’s twentieth anniversary.

Erin Gruwell started college expecting to become a lawyer; however, following the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent LA Riots, Gruwell realized that her calling was not in a courtroom, but a classroom. Gruwell began her tenure as an English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. Her studestudents were considered unteachable, andthe educational system had all but forgotten about them.

After intercepting a racist caricature depicting one of her students, Gruwell told her students that it was drawings like that which led to the

ERIN GRUWELL

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