the freedom writers diary essay

The Freedom Writers Diary

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The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them

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Summary and Study Guide

The Freedom Writers Diary is a nonfiction book that collects the stories of English teacher Erin Gruwell and her students at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, as they move from their freshman to senior years from 1994-1998. The book is divided into eight major sections, one for the fall and spring of each year, as well as a forward and epilogue. Each major section begins with an introductory entry from Ms. Gruwell , followed by anonymous, numbered diary entries from her students. 

At the beginning of the book, Ms. Gruwell is just about to start her first official year as an English teacher. As a student teacher the previous year, Ms. Gruwell found a racial caricature one of her students had drawn of Sharaud , her most difficult student. When she compared this drawing to the propaganda the Nazis used during the Holocaust, she realized her students didn’t know what the Holocaust was and decided to focus the remainder of the year on tolerance. Her efforts attracted positive attention from the media , but she also received death threats and endured disparaging racial comments from neighbors. Her school department head, leery of her unconventional teaching methods and worried about negative publicity, assigned Ms. Gruwell to teach “at risk” freshman for the rest of that year, rather than continuing teaching the class Sharaud was in.

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The students in Ms. Gruwell’s freshman class are almost all African American, Latino, or Asian, and at first, they are suspicious of their white, suit-wearing teacher. They bet she will quit within the first week or month, but she quickly wins them over with unique teaching methods and reading material the students find relatable. The fall of their freshman year, they read Durango Street , a book about an African American teenager living in the projects after being released from a juvenile work camp for stealing cars, and then they make a movie about it. In the spring, when they read Romeo and Juliet and, Ms. Gruwell compares the Capulets to a local Latino gang and the Montagues to a rival Asian gang and gains the respect of more students. Still, the students deal with many difficulties that distract them from school, including race-based gang violence, domestic violence, illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and homelessness.

During the students’ sophomore year, Ms. Gruwell organizes a “toast for change” and a “Read-a-thon for Tolerance.” Among the books that the students read are Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl , and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. After reading these books, the students have the idea to invite Zlata, a teenager their age who wrote her diary from 1992 to 1993, during the Bosnian War, to visit their classroom. They write her letters, and she agrees to come for a visit. This same year, the students are also visited by a Holocaust survivor and Miep Gies , the woman responsible for hiding Anne Frank’s family and later, retrieving the dead girl’s diary.

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For the students’ junior year, Ms. Gruwell asks them to turn their diary entries into a book. The students decide to call themselves Freedom Writers after learning about the Civil Rights-era Freedom Riders, who took bus trips through the south in the 1960s to protest segregation. Once the book is completed, they raise money for a trip to Washington, D.C. to present the book to U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley.

Their senior year, as the students begin to think about their future, they are the subject of a Los Angeles Times feature that draws increased media and public attention to their project. Over winter break, Ms. Gruwell learns that they have won The Spirit of Anne Frank Award and must accept it in person in New York. The company GUESS? sponsors travel for 45 students to New York to accept the award, and, shortly thereafter, the students learn that Doubleday wants to formally publish their book of diary entries. As the year concludes, the students learn of where they have been accepted to college, and they plan a Freedom Writer reunion trip to Europe the next summer. 

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In Defense of the 'Freedom Writers'

The teacher who inspired the 2007 Hilary Swank film still believes memoir writing is the best way to reach struggling students.

In the early 1990s, a young schoolteacher named Erin Gruwell made a radical change in her curriculum. Frustrated by her efforts to inspire her low-achieving students, she handed out journals and asked the kids to write about their own lives. Their poignant personal essays were later published in The Freedom Writers Diary , a book that inspired the 2007 film Freedom Writers .

Today, Gruwell runs the Freedom Writers Foundation, which aims to help teachers "engage, enlighten, and empower at-risk students to reach their full potential." She spoke with Atlantic senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz about the October magazine story "The Writing Revolution" and her conviction that personal writing still belongs in the classroom.

There's a scene in the movie Freedom Writers where Hillary Swank is standing helplessly in front of a blackboard, trying to teach essay writing while the students revolt. What happened in real life when you tried to teach those kinds of lessons?

When I first walked into that classroom, there were 150 kids who hated writing, hated me, hated everything. I had to learn how to make things relevant to them. Part of the challenge, for me, was to model great writing. In the beginning, when my syllabus kept coming back to me in the form of a paper airplane, the students kept asking, "Why do we have to read books by dead white guys in tights?"

What inspired you to focus on memoirs?

The question was, how do you engage a kid from who, from the get-go, doesn't want to read or write? So I thought, "I'm going to go out and find stories that matter to them -- stories by Alice Walker and Gary Soto and Amy Tan, people writing about things that are so relevant to these kids who can't see a future outside their own community." I love "a rose is a rose is a rose," but when you have your students sit down and deconstruct Tupac's "The Rose That Grew From Concrete," they think, "Wow, this teacher cares enough about us to find subject matters in our world."

Peg Tyre's Atlantic story is about New Dorp High School, a low-performing school that traded in journaling and creative writing for more a rigorous academic curriculum. How do you feel about that decision?

Students have to be able to think critically. But where I saw huge cause for alarm in that piece was the idea that we don't want to focus on memoirs. When I read that quote from David Coleman saying, "As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think" -- that's a very cavalier comment. It negates all of those kids who are marginalized.

At Freedom Writers, we do give a shit what those kids think and feel. We're training teachers who work with at-risk kids in some poorest schools in the country, kids who have been written off. So while I'm excited that New Dorp is trying a new direction, to throw the baby out with the bathwater is really unfortunate.

Were you able to teach your students the fundamentals of writing in the process of having them read and write memoirs?

Absolutely. When you're too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. So I always tried to use different learning modalities -- kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life. At one point, I brought in two sandwiches. One of them was a really simple sandwich: a piece of white bread, a piece of baloney, and another piece of white bread. The other one was a really fancy sandwich that had French bread, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and heaps of turkey.

I used that as a metaphor to help my students deconstruct sentences. You can write a really simple sentence. Or you can use language to communicate all of these other things. I pulled sentences out of whatever we were reading and broke them down. And if one of my students wrote an incredible line, that also got thrown into the mix. The absolute best lines in the movie Freedom Writers directly came straight from my students' journal entries.

Do you see journaling as a means to an end -- a way to get students excited about writing so they'll go on to write academic papers? Or do you think memoir writing has its own value?

Definitely both. I want to give credit to a Holocaust survivor named Renee Firestone. She was at Auschwitz when she was a teenager, so she missed out on high school, graduation, and college. When my students met her and asked, "Why do you continue to tell your story?" she told them, "Evil prevails when good people do nothing." It was a rallying cry to all of my students to do something.

And so we put together this little book -- a book that not only got published but went on to help so many kids around the world think, "Now is the time to write my own story." Our book is one of the most stolen books in every school library. It's the go-to book in juvenile halls. By telling their own stories, my students helped give a voice to the voiceless.

Writing is powerful. Whether it's a little girl hiding from the Nazis in an attic, or Amnesty International writing letters on behalf of political prisoners, the power of telling stories is usually what causes change.

Is that part of your goal, to encourage students to become activists by telling their own stories?

One of the teachers we trained this summer was from Rwanda. He lost his family in the 1994 genocide. Now he's an educator in a school made up entirely of refugees. Every single one of those kids is an orphan from that situation. How can this teacher inspire every single one of those kids to know that they have a story? For instance, there was one young girl writing about sex trafficking and the proliferation of AIDS in Rwanda today. Part of her conclusion is that she has a choice. No one has to continue living this lifestyle.

Phillips Academy Andover recently had us do a presentation there. Most of the kids were headed to Harvard, Yale, all the Ivy Leagues. But they loved The Freedom Writers Diary . It was really important for them to realize that not every kid has a parent who can pay for SAT prep. Some kids have to work 3 or 4 jobs just to pay the rent. Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

What would you say to a school like New Dorp that's planning to shift away from memoir writing and take on a more academic approach?

To take an element of the writing process away from these kids does them a disservice. When it comes to teaching writing, I just don't think it can be black and white. The political timing of your article is fantastic. I was glued to the TV during the Chicago strike. I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. It's a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered. For me, was about having that incredible mix of diverse and dynamic literature. But we all want our kids to be literate, to graduate and go to college -- by any means necessary.

Watch a scene from the movie Freedom Writers

The Freedom Writers Diary Literary Elements

By erin gruwell.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

Autobiographical non-fiction

Setting and Context

A high school in Long Beach, California between 1994 and 1998, covering the four-year transition from freshman year to senior year.

Narrator and Point of View

The book is comprised of multiple narrators in the form of first-person perspective diary entries.

Tone and Mood

The tone varies throughout according to content of each diary, but overall the mood remains optimistic, positive, and committed to the concept of change for the better.

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonists: the Freedom Writers. Antagonist: social ills ranging from racism to anti-Semitism to gang violence to drug abuse and more.

Major Conflict

The primary conflict at work in the text pits the desire and ambition of those involved in the Freedom Writers program against external forces seeking to obstruct it either through active interference or the consequences of indifference.

The book reaches its climax with the moment that the students decide to adopt the name Freedom Writers for themselves in honor of the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement.

Foreshadowing

Understatement.

The name “Freedom Writers” is an allusion to the “Freedom Riders” movement during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s seeking to bring about social change through a concerted voter registration effort.

One of the dominant pieces of imagery in the book is that of a peanut shell. The students receive an assignment to describe both the exterior and interior of a peanut as a lesson in learning to judge a person by what is on the inside rather than superficial external appearance.

Demonstrated primarily through expressions of personal stories of students. For instance, one student writes of the paradox of growing up in a society that often singles out the father as the center of moral authority within a family unit when her own reality is the confirmation that her father is the last person she would seek for moral guidance.

Parallelism

A major thematic unifying technique of the book is the persistent parallel drawn between Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic, both of whom authored diaries about living under horrifically oppressive regimes. In turn, the diaries of the Freedom Writers are pulled into the parallel structure as expressions of living under various—less intense—types of oppressive circumstances.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

When a student asks “What’s the Holocaust?” Ms. Gruwell is shocked. Thus begins an earnest and devoted effort to learn about the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis which falls under the metonymic umbrella reference of Holocaust.

Personification

From the Peanut Game exercise: “Slowly my peanuts began to take form. I wasn’t afraid because they weren’t accompanied by a tophat, tap shoes, and a corny jingle. Instead they began to have purpose, they began to set goals, dreams, and ambitions. My peanuts, before my very eyes, changed into human beings.”

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The Freedom Writers Diary Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for The Freedom Writers Diary

The Freedom Writers Diary study guide contains a biography of Erin Gruwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The Freedom Writers Diary: How a teacher and 150 students used writing to change themselves and the world around them

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The Freedom Writers Diary Study Guide

Erin Gruwell is an American educator and activist known for her work with at-risk youth in Long Beach, California. She gained national attention for her innovative teaching methods and dedication to her students, which inspired the creation of The Freedom Writers Diary.

The Freedom Writers Diary is a collection of journal entries written by Gruwell's students, who were part of a diverse group of teenagers facing significant challenges in their lives. Gruwell encouraged them to express their thoughts and experiences through writing, providing them with a safe space to share their stories and build connections with each other.

The diary was published in 1999 and became a bestseller, leading to the development of a successful film adaptation starring Hilary Swank. The book and film have since inspired countless educators and students to use writing as a tool for self-expression and empowerment.

The Freedom Writers Diary is a powerful testament to the resilience and creativity of young people, and a reminder of the importance of empathy and understanding in education. It continues to resonate with readers around the world, serving as a testament to the transformative power of education and the potential for positive change in even the most challenging circumstances.

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The Freedom Writers Diary

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Freedom Writers — “Freedom Writers”: Summary and Analysis of The Film

"Freedom Writers": Summary and Analysis of The Film

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Updated: 29 November, 2023

Words: 898 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

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Works Cited

• Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. The University of Chicago Press.
• Gordon, R. J. (2016). The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War. Princeton University Press.
• Jones, C. I. (2016). The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population. Brookings Institution Press.
• Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Simon & Schuster.
• Mandelbaum, M. (2013). The Road to Global Prosperity. Simon and Schuster.
• Mankiw, N. G. (2014). Principles of Microeconomics. Cengage Learning.
• Mishkin, F. S. (2012). The Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets. Pearson.
• Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.
• Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Methuen & Co.
• Sowell, T. (2015). Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy. Basic Books.

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