Gruwell Gives Powerful Launch to Climate & Culture Summit
Erin Gruwell, founder of the Freedom Writers, delivers the opening keynote address at the Summit on School Climate and Culture.
Students won’t report until later this month but the 2016-17 school year effectively began Monday morning when the first annual DMPS Summit on School Climate and Culture got off to a rousing start at the Iowa Events Center downtown.
Some 1,200 registrants from area school districts couldn’t have asked for a better mood-setter than the opening keynote address from Erin Gruwell, the self-described “ordinary teacher” from Long Beach, California who turned a batch of 150 “extraordinary students” that everyone else had given up on into the famed Freedom Writers. Long, inspirational story short, the Long Beach losers and their naïve but dedicated teacher became a Hollywood feature film and rock stars on the education speaker circuit.
The movie came out nine years ago but Gruwell still gets moved when she tells the story. That’s what she does, just like she taught her kids to do. She tells a personal story. She doesn’t make speeches. Her eyes sometimes well up and sometimes are pulled shut by wide grins as she recounts the tragedies and triumphs that played out in Room 203 of the high school where she taught.
“I was the cheerleader from hell when I started,” she said, “in polka dots and pearls. I found out that my kids knew things I didn’t know. And I learned from them. Because there can be a huge disconnect between educational theory and practice.”
One of her lessons for this audience of educators is to let their students educate them. An emerging pedagogy in diverse, urban districts like Long Beach and Des Moines is to capitalize on students’ life experience as living text material.
While she spoke her students became Sue Ellen, Tiffany, Calvin and Maria; deprived, abused, minority kids that every teacher in the crowded ballroom knows and recognized.
One of them introduced her. Russhaun Johnson, the outgoing student body president at North High who has graduated all the way from homelessness to Drake University, prefaced Gruwell’s story with a spoken word poem that was a synopsis of his own improbable rise. She labeled him the district’s “poet laureate” when she followed him at the podium.
“My students didn’t like reading, they didn’t like writing and they didn’t like me,” Gruwell said.
She was also up against cynical administrators who told her they hoped her students dropped out before their standardized test scores dropped the school’s average. She got the idea to assign books written by and about young people. The Diary of Anne Frank, for instance. But her bosses wouldn’t buy the idea so Gruwell had to buy the books herself. It was a good hunch and a good investment. Eventually an eyewitness to the events in Anne Frank’s short life accepted an invitation to come to Long Beach and meet Gruwell’s late-bloomers.
Now they have blossomed into PhDs and teachers and they, like their own teacher, travel the country to share the remarkable story they wrote together. Even Maria, the class “badass” who showed up on the first day wearing an ankle monitor so her probation officer could track her, has testified before Congress. The first thing Maria wrote in Gruwell’s class was this: “I hate Miss Gruwell and if I wasn’t on probation already I would probably ‘shake’ her!” To which Gruwell now responds: “At least she punctuated it properly.”
One big advance takeaway from this two-day groundbreaking event is that teachers in DMPS will not face the administrative obstruction that Gruwell did. The summit is happening because of the recognition here that children, just like corn and cows, grow best in optimal conditions. If they aren’t born into them it becomes all the more critical that schools provide them.
“I feel honored to be in a place like Des Moines that is opening itself” to new and better ways of growing kids who too often become casualties of political and cultural wars, Gruwell said.
When she finished after more than an hour she received a standing ovation that was deserved but almost obligatory. The real measure of her impact was when the lights came up after excerpts from the film were played to illustrate her remarks. People were wiping eyes, sniffling and blowing noses. This was not your garden variety professional development. The stampede was on to the first batch of more than 80 breakout sessions that are scheduled during the summit. And everyone was in the mood after being reminded by one of their own of the importance, nobility and perks of their profession.
