Erin gruwell biography autobiography memoir
Erin Gruwell
American teacher (born 1969)
Erin Gruwell (born August 15, 1969) keep to an American teacher known care her unique teaching method, which led to the publication be required of The Freedom Writers Diary: Gain a Teacher and 150 Juvenescence Used Writing to Change Yourselves and the World Around Them (1999). The 2007 film Freedom Writers and the 2019 PBS documentary Freedom Writers: Stories exaggerate the Heart are based not a word her story.
Education
Erin Gruwell was born in Glendora, California do research Stephen Douglass Gruwell, a preceding baseball scout for the City Angels, and Sandra Faye Toss. Her parents divorced when she was still a young miss. She graduated from Bonita Extraordinary School in La Verne, Calif., and the University of Calif., Irvine, where she received goodness Lauds and Laurels Distinguished Alumni Award. She earned her master's degree and teaching credentials strange California State University, Long Seashore, where she was honored laugh Distinguished Alumna by the Faculty of Education.
Gruwell originally wilful to go to law secondary to become a lawyer comparatively than a teacher. After conforming the 1992 Los Angeles riots on news coverage, she fixed to change her profession evaluate a teacher because she estimated educating students could make betterquality of a difference. She valid, "I thought, God, by representation time you're defending a toddler in the courtroom, the battle's already lost. I think dump the real fighting should inexorable here, in the classroom."[2]
Career
Gruwell began student teaching in 1994 cultivate Woodrow Wilson High School put in Long Beach, California. She was assigned low-performing students in probity school. One student, a stripling named Sharaud, had recently transferred to Wilson from a opposition high school where he difficult allegedly threatened his teacher chart a gun.[3] However, a infrequent months into the school era, one of her other group of pupils passed a note depicting Sharaud (an African American) with hefty lips. Gruwell told her grade that it was drawings become visible that which led to righteousness Holocaust. When one of make public students asked her what excellence Holocaust was, she was fall over by uncomprehending looks—none of other half students had heard of lone of the defining moments discount the 20th century.[3][4] Gruwell took the students to see Schindler's List, bought new books reveal of her own pocket give orders to invited guest speakers.[5]
After her assemblage of student teaching, Gruwell complementary to Wilson as a congested teacher, this time with unembellished class of sophomores. Her binge semester got off to out rocky start due to pupil protests of Proposition 187—but Gruwell persevered and reached her course group by asking them to occupy journals and make movies forestall their lives, and by telling the family feud in Romeo and Juliet to a band war.[3] She also had illustriousness students read books written fail to see and about other teenagers cover times of war, such likewise The Diary of a Verdant Girl, Zlata's Diary and Night.[6] Writing journals became a consolation for many of the division, and because the journals were shared anonymously, teenagers who previously at once dir refused to speak to benignant of a different race became like a family.[4]
In the put away of 1995, Gruwell gave surplus of her students a briefcase full of new books take precedence had them make a congratulate for change.[3][5] After that, she saw a turnaround in them. All 150 Freedom Writers slow from high school and numerous went on to attend college.[7]
Between 1994 and 1998, the Autonomy Writers garnered a great look like of media coverage, including obsequies on Primetime Live, The View and Good Morning America.[8]
After teaching
In 1998, after teaching for nonpareil four years, Gruwell left Bugologist High School and became systematic Distinguished Teacher in Residence bully California State University, Long Foreshore. Gruwell later went on round start the Freedom Writers Scaffold, which aspires to spread righteousness Freedom Writers method across illustriousness country.[8]
The Freedom Writers Diary in your right mind a 1999 book written dampen the Freedom Writers with intros by Erin Gruwell. It even-handed the basis of the 2007 movie Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank as Gruwell, and Gruwell is the subject of rectitude 2019 PBS documentary Freedom Writers: Stories from the Heart.
She has written an autobiographical margin of her experiences, entitled Teach with Your Heart: Lessons Uproarious Learned from the Freedom Writers, published around the same hour as the movie's release.
She has also worked regularly junk the Anti-Defamation League, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Simon Investigator Center, and even the U.S. State Department, to promote holy tolerance.[9]