Erin Gruwell, the beloved teacher turned author who used writing to encourage her troubled students to express themselves in a new way, returned to the Mohawk Valley to present her recently released documentary, “Freedom Writers: Stories from the Heart,” on October 30.
Gruwell hosted a viewing of the documentary and a Q & A session at the Stanley Theatre in Utica. The event, sponsored by the Utica National Insurance Group, was free and open to the public. 
Gruwell is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Freedom Writers Diary.” The book, published in 1999 and the basis for the 2007 movie, “Freedom Writers,” starring Hilary Swank, tells the story of Gruwell and her 150 at-risk students at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California during the early 1990s. Her students, originally labeled as “unteachable,” lived in a racially divided community filled with drugs, gang warfare and homicides. The racial division - - and the hostility, indifference and tension that came with it - - spilled into the classroom.
Determined to create a brighter future for her students, Gruwell turned to writing and literature to persuade them to embrace history, humanity and hope. She specifically used literature to compare the turmoil of the time to some of the worst examples of human’s inhumanity towards one another. Her students were particularly inspired by the writings of Anne Frank during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Elie Wiese, a young boy who, along with his father, was imprisoned in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and Zlata Filipovic, a young girl who lived through the horrors of the Bosnian War. The parallels to their own lives emboldened Gruwell’s students to write their own journals, becoming a form of solace. When the students anonymously read each other’s journals, division was replaced with unity and understanding. As a result, the “Freedom Writers” were born.
Told from the perspective of Gruwell and her students, “Freedom Writers: Stories from the Heart,” depicts what happened before, during and after Gruwell’s students first entered her classroom 25 years ago.
On October 29, three of Gruwell’s former students, or “Freedom Writers,” Tony Bacerra, Shanete Jones and Shanite Jones, spoke to the Upper Elementary School’s fifth and six grades during a special assembly in the school gym. The “Freedom Writers,” along with Gruwell, travel to communities across the United States and beyond to train educators to develop interesting and substantive curriculum for students based on the Freedom Writers Methodology, and bring hope by sharing their stories of overcoming diversity through education with teachers and students. The work they have accomplished continues to be an inspiration to the students they visit while allowing them to open up about the tough issues they deal with today.
Prior to the viewing of her documentary, Gruwell spoke to ninth grade students from several area school districts at the Stanley Theatre. She also visited Proctor High School in Utica.