Why Do Teachers Make Students Read Anne Frank

Erin Gruwell took a job educatee teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California in 1994. Over the next iv years, she establish she changed non just her ain life but also those of the 150 students that passed through her classroom. A recently completed documentary digs into her story, which was the basis for the 2007 moving-picture show, "Freedom Writers" starring Hilary Swank equally Gruwell.

The documentary explores Gruwell's feel working in a school that remained markedly segregated even decades after the landmark Supreme Court conclusion Brown 5. Board of Education declared "separate simply equal" unconstitutional. When Gruwell discovered students passing around a racist extravaganza of i of their classmates, she explained how this kind of imagery was comparable to the propaganda spread by the Nazis. When but one of the students had heard of the Holocaust, Gruwell decided to shift the focus of the grade entirely.

Her unconventional didactics style moved abroad from the standard curriculum plant in most high school English classes – Shakespeare, the classics – and helped students to understand how narrative storytelling could be more personal. She had her students keep journals, which allowed them to explore their own personal experiences while also becoming empathetic to the experiences of others. Gruwell assigned readings from "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "Zlata's Diary." She invited speakers to class, including Miep Gies, the Dutch adult female who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis.

The new syllabus transformed the students. Non only did they cover their own work, taking pride in telling their own stories, they also began to engage with students dissimilar from them. Where Gruwell first establish intractable divisions between students from different backgrounds, she suddenly began to see a growing agreement and even friendship.

The students' work was compiled in "The Freedom Writers Diary", offset published in 1999. The name paid homage to 1960s civil rights group, The Freedom Riders. The book was a New York Times bestseller and has been published in over a dozen languages. Proceeds from sales of the book funded higher scholarships for many of the original Freedom Writers.

The documentary release coincides with the book'southward 20th anniversary. Gruwell is currently working with students to compile a whole new fix of stories for a new generation of young writers.

Q: How did this documentary develop?

Erin Gruwell: Andy Russell [President of Public Media Group of Southern California] came to ane of our local screenings and was so enamored with not simply the film but the outcome that night. Nosotros packed this auditorium at UC Irvine with every cross-section of L.A. from undocumented kids and loftier schoolhouse students to college students, business leaders and Holocaust survivors — a dramatically diverse grouping, where we cried, and got down and dirty with these very intense subject matters nearly racism and inequality.

So Andy and his team, expressed that they really wanted to make a documentary with us. We are at present doing seven different screenings across the six counties that PBS reaches, recreating the magic that Andy experienced that dark.

Going back to 1994 when you showtime began teaching, what brought you to Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach, California?

Gruwell: Brown versus Board of Instruction was a landmark conclusion declaring divide is non equal. It is one of the near important Supreme Courtroom decisions and demonstrates how public instruction is a democratic result. Unfortunately, schools today are as segregated if non more and then than they were dorsum in the 1950s. And I know that with great authority because I've traveled over the final 20 years to all 50 states with our book.

I had but graduated from graduate school, and I chose Wilson High considering on paper it was a beautiful microcosm of every race and every economical level — to me it was everyone you lot would want America to exist. So here's this diverse urban center, it'south rich, it'south poor, all these kids are coming together, and information technology's going to exist kumbaya.

That's not what happened. School systems create programs within programs, schools inside schools, charabanc routes inside bus routes. And so you see this blatant segregation and separation.

I retrieve I was actually naive about that. What I found, because I was make new and I didn't live in the city, was that at that place was a lot of intrinsic separation and masked racism. It happened to the kids I ended up didactics because I had all the kids who were busted, kids who had learning disabilities and kids had trouble with the police force. I was basically this new teacher given the students that nobody else wanted.

Can y'all tell us a little bit about what inspired you to have students pick upwards journal writing and how you folded that into your teaching method?

Gruwell: When my syllabus came dorsum at me in the grade of a paper aeroplane with the comment, "Why do nosotros have to read books written by expressionless white guys in tights?" I wanted to teach my students the universality of storytelling. If a story has great universal themes, information technology'due south going to transcend race; information technology's going to transcend geographies and transcend time. And so I wanted to encourage my students to tell their story. They've seen things that no child should run across and have experienced things the no kid should feel.

Then I had to effigy out ways to get them to empathize the power of writing outside of the formal academic setting. The journals were a stream of consciousness for writing their outset drafts and eventually, nosotros would become back and rewrite these.

And and so these were compiled into "The Liberty Writers Diary." How did you become the students to agree to share their personal stories? What was their response in having their piece of work published — was it empowering?

Gruwell: They not only read but met these incredible storytellers. We read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and then we brought in Miep Gies, the woman that saved her. Nosotros read "Zlata's Diary," she had been hailed every bit a modern-day Anne Frank from Bosnia, and we had her speak to the class. We took field trips to museums and invited guest speakers, and suddenly information technology didn't just feel like an sometime white man from another era.

So my pitch to my students was, "Could you imagine someday that there'south going to be a child who was homeless just like you? In that location's going to be a kid who lost her dad just like you. And you volition go the authority of your accurate story." We were going to take their journals, bind them in a volume and present them to the U.S. Secretarial assistant of Educational activity. Nosotros were going to go to D.C. every bit the original Freedom Riders did in the '60s to alter segregation. We initially thought we could give this book to the Secretarial assistant to heighten awareness of the segregation we were seeing in schools.

Just and then they asked, "Why do we take to end there? Allow's send information technology out to the earth, like a message in a canteen." So it became this beautiful tribute. Nosotros sent information technology to every publishing house and every single one of them rejected us except for the business firm that published Anne Frank'southward diary.

So information technology was this serendipitous moment, and we decided to make it an homage to Room 203.

The amazing matter is, 20 years subsequently, we're nonetheless together. We're at present in the procedure of writing new stories for the 20th anniversary edition, and it'south equally painful. The stories that we're asking of them are merely as painful at present but told from a vantage point of wisdom.

There are stories about beingness undocumented, stories near #MeToo and stories about addiction. A trivial girl who wrote Diary 62 on being molested by her Uncle Joe is no longer a kid. She is now a woman with a child the same historic period she was when she was molested. She'due south ready to say, "I'1000 ready to put my name and my confront to that story." It'south empowering.

How did your work with those original writers blossom into the Freedom Writers Foundation?

Gruwell: Originally it was very much about these 150 students seeing the globe, because my students didn't accept parents who bought books, took them on field trips, took them to museums or who traveled the world. When this book came out, it became the scholarship for them to go to higher.

My students were on their ain. If they were going to go to college, we could assist pay for the books for the semester. The book was eventually translated in over a dozen languages, and it became number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. So nosotros started training teachers and giving scholarships to educators. Now we take 700 Freedom Writer teachers. They're in every single state in America, eight provinces in Canada and 20 countries.

It'due south incredible because these Freedom Writer teachers are doing the exact same matter that I did with my students. They're doing it better because they're not alone. I was solitary, and I was making stuff upwardly every bit I went. Nosotros deal with everything that a teacher would face with kids including mental wellness, suicide, addiction, violence and learning disabilities.

What are some of the biggest challenges you encounter public schools facing today?

Gruwell: We recently started a podcast and we had Begetter Greg Boyle who started Homeboy Industries and Dr. Pedro Noguera from UCLA whose inquiry is about the school-to-prison pipeline. What I have found, and what Father Boyle and Patrick have too found, is the implicit bias and the segregation that is nevertheless happening in our schools and how that leads to the school-to-prison pipeline. I spend the vast majority of my time visiting juvenile halls, and it is disproportionately young men of color. Any we're doing in our schools isn't enough to engage our young voices.

For me, education is very politicized. We send our kids abroad to subject field them and nosotros oasis't learned to teach Socratically to make them a role of the procedure. Information technology's very liberating when you requite somebody a vocalization. And so I recall that our volume was the voice. I recollect that our feature flick was the voice. I recall this documentary is the most exquisite of all three because you run into and hear them in their natural habitat. In the books, they were anonymous and they were numbered. The feature moving picture was a extravaganza. The documentary is downwards and muddy.

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Source: https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/freedom-writers-stories-heart/how-california-teacher-erin-gruwell-inspired-a-generation-of-writers

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