In 1992, Erin Gruwell was a high-achieving and idealistic college student from an upper-middle-class California family, making plans for law school. Then came the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

"For those of us living in Southern California, it was such a dramatic moment," Gruwell said. "Seeing kids being taught to loot and pillage, I just made this fundamental switch in my brain."

That switch would pluck Gruwell from her comfortable existence into the "war zone" of Room 203 at Wilson High School in Long Beach. She was driven by the belief that she "could make more of a difference in a classroom than a courtroom," reasoning that "by the time a kid gets to a courtroom, you're being reactionary."

There couldn't have been a starker contrast between the fresh-out-of-college teacher eager to make a difference and her detached Latino, Asian, and African-American students. Hardened and united by poverty and a familiarity with the prison, juvenile-detention, and drug-rehab systems, they also shared a label - "unteachable" - slapped on them by the public school system.

The inner-city students admittedly "terrified" Gruwell. Nonetheless, she recognized they were doing their best to survive their hostile environment, and she never wavered in a belief that she had found her calling. "I just got busy," she said, "because I have found that sometimes, analysis can lead to paralysis."

One "horrific" analysis not lost on Gruwell: "We spend about $8,000 on average to educate and about $50,000 to incarcerate a kid. There's just something so desperately wrong with this. I've always wanted to help the underdog. To be a voice for those who didn't believe they had one."

Helping Them Find Their Voice
How Gruwell helped her students find their own voice eventually became the stuff of a No. 1 New York Times best-seller and a Hollywood movie. The rudimentary tools she used - notebooks and pens - allowed her students to write an entirely new script for their future.

It only took her a little while before she found her footing. When the school administrator saw Gruwell's initial teaching plan, she scoffed. "Homer's Odyssey. These kids will not be able to read this. Have you seen their reading and vocabulary scores?" she asked Gruwell, who was undeterred. "I knew these kids had odysseys of their own," Gruwell said. "Take Maria. She had a Ph.D. of the streets. I wanted to find out why she hated everyone. What would cause her to get straight Fs, to join a gang where she was so savagely beaten in her initiation that she ended up in a hospital for three weeks?"

One day, disgusted to find a mocking caricature of one of her African-American students with huge, exaggerated lips being passed around the classroom, Gruwell burst out, "This is the type of propaganda that the Nazis used during the Holocaust!"

"What's the Holocaust?" a student asked. Not a single hand went up when Gruwell asked if anyone in the class could answer. But when she asked how many of them had been shot at, nearly every hand went up. Many pulled up their shirts to show the scars of their bullet or stab wounds.

"That was the first time the class bonded," she said. "I told them that if we don't learn from past mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them, and I was going to do everything humanly possible to make sure that did not happen."

She scrapped her plan to teach English literature the conventional way and instead focused on making history relevant. She got them The Diary of Anne Frank and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo - hoping to demonstrate to "her" kids that as dire as their predicament might seem, they shouldn't lose hope. Then, she did one better and brought the books to life.

She arranged for Zlata Filipovic, the author of Zlata's Diary, who was living in Ireland at the time, to visit their classroom and share her experience of surviving the war in Bosnia. Next, the students worked together to raise funds to fly Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid Anne Frank, from Amsterdam to California.

Just as Frank and Filipovic had recorded their deepest thoughts and feelings, Gruwell asked her students to pen their own war-zone experiences. To encourage complete honesty, she promised that each journal would be kept anonymous. She asked them to write something in it every day, be it a story, a poem, or even a favorite song. They would not be graded. Getting their stream-of-consciousness struggles down on paper became cathartic. Their journals became a place of liberation. The "Freedom Writers" were born. Gruwell had all of her students make a life-altering "toast for change."

Over sparkling apple juice, the freshmen agreed to give themselves a chance to start their lives over again - and keep writing. They successfully lobbied the school administration to allow Gruwell to continue to teach them through senior-year English. Gruwell held three part-time jobs in order to take her kids to places they would not have the opportunity to go on their own. "I was selling lingerie at Nordstrom, working as a concierge at a Marriott, and teaching night school at a local university in addition to my full-time teaching job at Wilson," she said. They went to see "Schindler's List" at a local movie theater, visited the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and eventually traveled to New York, where they received the "Spirit of Anne Frank Award," and Washington, D.C., where on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, all 150 Freedom Writers started chanting, "Freedom Writers have a dream!" It was fitting, as their moniker is a play on the pioneering 1960s civil rights activists, the Freedom Riders.

"This was the first time many of them had ever left Long Beach," Gruwell said. "I lived vicariously through them as they experienced for the first time things most take for granted … the soap, shampoo, conditioner in the hotel room, which they brought home with them."

Not only did Gruwell pay for these trips with her own money, she paid a far heavier price. Her long hours and single-minded dedication to her kids took a toll on her marriage, which eventually ended in divorce.

From the Classroom to the World
Gruwell's plan was to take a few of each student's best journal entries to an office-supply store to have them bound as "a testament to those four years," she said. She could never have imagined that the stories would become the best-selling book The Freedom Writers Diary, and be turned into a feature film starring two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank.

Swank - who came from a dysfunctional family, never graduated high school, and lived in a car with her mom while trying to break into acting - obviously warmed to the role. "Hilary nailed my part," Gruwell said.

"We started in a classroom in California, but our classroom is now the world," she said. "The movie has been distributed internationally, and the book has been translated into 11 languages."

Today, all of the 150 original Freedom Writers have graduated from high school and most have graduated from college. Gruwell followed - or led - many of them to the local community college and then to California State University, Long Beach, where she taught until 2005. Some are pursuing master's degrees, others doctorates. Many have followed in the footsteps of "Ms. G," as they lovingly call her, and have become teachers. "It's amazing to see that not only did they change their own life, but they are changing their communities," Gruwell said. "We have seven Freedom Writers who are teachers in schools they actually attended, which is incredible."

Having left formal classroom instruction, Gruwell now leads the Freedom Writers Foundation, which provides scholarships to deserving students (the original Freedom Writers among them) and trains teachers on her innovative teaching methods. Then there is the Freedom Writers Institute, a yearlong program for teachers centered on a five-day seminar taught by Gruwell and many of her students.

Taking Her Message to Colleges and Cells
On top of those two jobs, Gruwell crisscrosses the country as a speaker. She took time from her hectic schedule this March to share her story with Convene before she was to address an audience of 400 at Cumberland County College in Vineland, N.J. A vivacious 38-year-old with an infectious smile, Gruwell radiates a can-do spirit. "Think about it," she said. "This evening, I'm 3,000 miles away from home, and I'm going to address a group of students, professors, and community members - each of whom has read our book. To me, that's just a dream come true."

The next day, she was off to meet with inmates at two nearby juvenile-detention homes, something she frequently does when she travels. "When I was able to bring the world into my classroom through speakers, it changed the whole dynamics of my class," Gruwell said. "Here are these people who have had these great life experiences, speaking to them - students who had been written off. I want to continue to pay it forward by visiting jails and juvenile-detention centers, places that no one really wants to go to. I've found that most kids who are incarcerated have had very traumatic schooling backgrounds. Many have learning disabilities that have never been addressed, and they feel marginalized by the school system. Unfortunately, there is a direct link between a lack of education and the prison system."

She leaves each inmate with at least one book, The Freedom Writers Diary, and a hug and kiss. "Many of these kids have never been hugged or kissed before," she said. "It's so bittersweet for me to think that if they had a parent who loved them, if they had affection, someone in their life who believed in them, they probably would not be where they are at now. It's a very special moment to leave these kids with books. Hopefully, by reading the stories of my kids, it will encourage them to write their own stories."

Public School System - Too Test-Oriented
A product of public school, right through graduate school, Gruwell is disheartened by the current state of the U.S. education system. "I wish more teachers were teaching their students and not teaching them to take a test," she said. "So many dynamic teachers are leaving the profession because they refuse to stop teaching in order to concentrate on tests." Gruwell is also frustrated by the lack of realization that there can be no one-size-fits-all teaching method. "For me," she said, "the best part of educating students is engaging them, enlightening them, and then truly empowering them."

Meet Gruwell, The Speaker
More than 7,000 of the top sellers in the financial services world were gathered at the Gaylord Opryland in the summer of 2002. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani mesmerized the group by relating how he led New York City after the horror of Sept. 11. Following Giuliani was a young teacher from Southern California named Erin Gruwell. She was largely unknown. The movie "The Freedom Writers" had not yet been released.

"The meeting planners were horrified," Gruwell said with a laugh. "There is Mayor Giuliani at the podium, surrounded by Secret Service agents, eight big-screen TVs, and all these teleprompters. They asked me for a copy of my speech, but I didn't have one. I'm an extemporaneous speaker."

Nervously, she made her way to the stage and brought the same passion she uses to motivate students to her speech. When she was finished, her standing ovation lasted 10 minutes, and many in the audience were sobbing. "She had a tough assignment, following Giuliani," said Ray Kopcinski, CMP, director of meeting services, Million Dollar Round Table. "The audience was moved by her presentation. Her naturalness, sincerity, and realness is what won people over."

It has been an easy transition from teacher to speaker. "When you're a teacher, you talk five hours a day, every day," Gruwell said. "I was trained in the classroom, talking to disaffected youth who didn't pay attention. Many had ADD and ADHD. I had to be very charismatic and make everything relevant. I approach my speeches the same way."

Today, she speaks about 100 times a year to a wide range of groups. The smallest group she has ever addressed - 18 Olympic coaches. Her largest audience -10,000 - who attended the National School Boards Association meeting a few months ago. She is frequently joined by one of the original Freedom Writers. In some cases, through the Freedom Writer Outreach Program, several of her original students will share their own stories.

One hundred percent of the proceeds from the books she sells at these speaking engagements, as well as a portion of the honorarium she receives, go back to her nonprofit. "This means more kids are getting scholarships to go to college," she said, "and more teachers are being trained."

While extemporaneous, she always takes the time to learn about the group and its goals beforehand. "People can tell if your speech is canned, if you're reading off a script, if you gave the same speech two days ago," Gruwell said. "It's important to me to be genuine, present, and connected."

Andrea Doyle is Convene's senior writer.
The Leading by Example series is sponsored by the Canadian Tourism Commission.
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