If you build it… they will learn

Dan is a first-year special education teacher in Brooklyn. You can read more of his writing on his own blog.

Educational change begins with teachers and curriculum. Teachers can best inspire and manage their students through curriculum designed around real issues that affect our students. Our philosophies and attitudes towards our profession and our students spell our success and failure. This is what a movie like “Freedom Writers” is all about. It’s not about a teacher losing her marriage and her life in order to help kids, nor is it meant to give a false sense of what a school really looks like. It’s about a philosophy of education that says all students deserve to be treated with respect, and a curriculum that validates our students’ experiences and challenges them to do something with those experiences.

“Freedom Writers” is based on a true story. The main teacher, Erin Gruwell, discovers a racist note being passed around her classroom and compares the event to Nazi propaganda. When she discovers her students are ignorant of the Holocaust, she sees the need to make tolerance the focus of her curriculum. Through literature such as “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Zlata’s “Diary,” combined with journaling, and discussion, Gruwell did something that wasn’t heroic. She merely taught, and the content naturally inspired her students to change. In my own school, the mere act of bringing in a copy of “The Freedom Writer’s Diary” transformed certain challenging and apathetic students into passionate readers.

Critics complain that such inspiring stories are not real and cannot be replicated. Never mind the fact that they are based on true success stories, and how the book “The Freedom Writer’s Diary” makes wonderful classroom curriculum. Tom Moore, in his Jan 19 New York Times op-ed piece, focused his ire on the idea that the underlying cause of movie miracles comes from the personal sacrifice of a teacher. He says these movies create unrealistic expectations on teachers, who cannot succeed without “better and safer workplaces.” On Feb. 5, a teacher on the education blog edwize described the movie “Freedom Writers” as propaganda for its message that a maverick teacher could inspire her students. “Starting out as a teacher, I was well aware of a system fraught with problems so deep that one person could not change it,” the teacher wrote. “I did not see myself as the person who comes into a classroom and stands and delivers.”

Although the hesitations of these critics are not unfounded, their skepticism is one of the main points this movie seeks to address. Idealist teachers abound, and their success in transforming classrooms and helping their students comes not only in the face of everyday school challenges, but despite these critics reminding them who they are not supposed to be. “You’re a first-time teacher, you can’t make someone want an education.” This is the negative support that Gruwell receives from her supervisors, and resembles the critics who saw “Freedom Writers” not as a model for what is possible, but as treatise on what cannot be.

Our profession may be complex in many ways, but stories of classroom success reveal simple truths about teaching. Films such as “Freedom Writers” allow us to reflect on our own craft and to think how each one of us, despite the odds, can transform our classrooms into energetic learning communities. While critics may see only propaganda, self-destruction and fiction, the change agent sees the creativity and ideas that can potentially shift the classroom culture that is long overdue for change.