Freedom Writers Diversity

1360 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Importance of a positive learning environment

I chose “The Freedom Writers” from the movie list. I had not seen this movie before this assignment and I was surprised I missed it before now. This movie was not only about the diversity in a school setting but about a new teacher who went above and beyond to provide the opportunity for her to gain an education when all odds were against all of them. The main problems that these students were facing racial segregation, poverty, and educational bias. This movie was sad and inspiring because of the struggles of the students and the story of a teacher who would not give up on these kids like everyone else had. The movie began showing the violent images of the 1992 Rodney King riots in Long Beach California. These students had grown-up in the middle of this hatred dividing the neighborhoods and even sections of the streets because of race and gangs. This movie was put together from the diaries of these students who had a successful day if they survived. Once the introduction gave the viewer an introduction into the lives of these students the attention was shifted to a new teacher sitting down with a department head excited to begin …show more content…

The school made very little available to these students and viewed themselves as babysitters until the students dropped out of school. The school also considered these minority students to be “dumb” and not capable of learning and simply not interested in gaining an education. One teacher in this school stepped up to prove that the school bias was wrong and without the school’s support provided these students with not only an education but the personal support they really needed. Opening many people’s eyes to real possibilities. This teacher turned around not only the students’ opinions of themselves but other’s opinions about them as

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Remember The Titans: Interpersonal Relations

    1159 Words  | 3 Pages

    The film starts with an uprising after a white storeowner kills a black teenager. This incident Highlights Prejudices. The teenager was labeled a thief because of the color of his skin and the unjustifiable murder causes racial tensions that exist as a result of the integration of the high schools.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Schooltalk By Mica Pollock

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    As Pollock states, “Equity efforts treat all young people as equally and infinitely valuable” (202). This book has made me realize that first and foremost: We must get to know each of our students on a personal level. Every student has been shaped by their own personal life experiences. We must take this into consideration for all situations. In life, I have learned that there is a reason why people act the way that they do. When people seem to have a “chip on their shoulder”, they have usually faced many hardships in life. “The goal of all such questions is deeper learning about real, respected lives: to encourage educators to learn more about (and build on) young people’s experiences in various communities, to consider their own such experiences, to avoid any premature assumptions about a young person’s “cultural practices,” and to consider their own reactions to young people as extremely consequential.” (3995) was also another excerpt from the book that was extremely powerful for me. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. I feel that I owe it to each of my students to know their stories and help them navigate through the hard times. On the other hand, even though a student seems like he/she has it all together, I shouldn’t just assume that they do. I must be sure that these students are receiving the attention and tools needed to succeed,

    Read More

  • Review of Kozol's Article on Urban Public Schools

    1664 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mr. Kozol provides his own socially conscious and very informative view of the issues facing the children and educators in this poverty ravaged neighborhood. Those forces controlling public schools, Kozol points out, are the same ones perpetuating inequity and suffering elsewhere; pedagogic styles and shapes may change, but the basic parameters and purposes remain the same: desensitization, selective information, predetermined "options," indoctrination. In theory, the decision should have meant the end of school segregation, but in fact its legacy has proven far more muddled. While the principle of affirmative action under the trendy code word ''diversity'' has brought unparalleled integration into higher education, the military and corporate America, the sort of local school districts that Brown supposedly addressed have rarely become meaningfully integrated. In some respects, the black poor are more hopelessly concentrated in failing urban schools than ever, cut off not only from whites but from the flourishing black middle class.

    Read More

  • Plessy V. Ferguson's Argumentative Essay

    567 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the book Students On Strike, a group of high school students were devastated at how unfairly they were treated and “It was easy to see that schools for blacks in our county were no equal to those for white children” (Stokes 52).

    Read More

  • Planning to End Ableism through Universal Design for Learning

    2133 Words  | 5 Pages

    While differentiating instruction and being able to design lessons geared towards the needs of diverse learners are currently highly prized skills for teachers, this has not always been the case. The history of education in the United States is a history of segregation. Even today, schools and curriculum are designed to meet the needs of a core group of students, which does not include students with disabilities (Hitchcock, Meyer, Rose, & Jackson, 2002). In the past, learners who were different, out of the mainstream, or did not fit into the mold to which teachers taught (were not part of the core) learned how or lost out on learning. This is not to say that teachers of the past did not care about their students, about being effective teachers, or about student learning. However, as schools are mirrors reflecting mainstream societal norms (Chartock, 2010; Delpit, 2006)—and, given that our society has not always valued diversity in people, be it due to disability, class, culture, or race—teachers in the past have largely focused their efforts where they could earn the largest return on their investment: the average student .

    Read More

  • Justice in movie Crash

    1143 Words  | 3 Pages

    This demonstrates to us that no matter how much your legal or moral laws are violated, what matters is how you as an individual react to the situation, justly or unjustly. This movie is centered around the notion that if you are a person of ethnic background, that alone is reason for others to forsake your rights, although in the long run justice will prevail

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Movie Walkout

    716 Words  | 2 Pages

    This movie is based on changing the lives of Mexican Americans by making a stand and challenging the authority. Even when the cops were against them the whole time and even with the brutal beatings they received within one of the walk out, they held on. They stuck to their guns and they proved their point. The main character was threatened by the school administrators, she was told if she went through with the walkout she would be expelled. While they wanted everyone who was going to graduate to simply look the other way, the students risked it all and gave it their all to make their voices

    Read More

  • The Good The Bad And The Ugly

    1767 Words  | 4 Pages

    The film I picked is "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." I first saw this movie about five years ago while a senior in high school. I loved the movie, but now after watching it I took a closer look at the stereotypes and generalizations that are being depicted in various ways like language, names, landscapes and people. I picked this film because the movie is famous and very well known by Italians, Americans, and Hispanics, and not just famous in America Hollywood (and because I had list of required films I had to pick from). While watching the movie my second time around I tried and focus on the location where the movie takes place in order to demonstrate how lands of Mexico, New Mexico and Texas generalized. I also placed attention to the names the characters are given. There is a term used in Hollywood called ‘little man wins' but after watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly one observe how this cliché is not used.

    Read More

  • Education of the Black Male in America

    2210 Words  | 5 Pages

    Today's education is often viewed as failing in its goal of educating students, especially those students characterized as minorities, including African American, Hispanic, and Appalachian students (Quiroz, 1999). Among the minority groups mentioned, African American males are affected most adversely. Research has shown that when Black male students are compared to other students by gender and race they consistently rank lowest in academic achievement (Ogbu, 2003), have the worst attendance record (Voelkle, 1999), are suspended and expelled the most often (Raffaele Mendez, 2003; Staples, 1982), are most likely to drop out of school, and most often fail to graduate from high school or to earn a GED (Pinkney, 2000; Roderick, 2003).

    Read More

  • Critical Race Theory And Labeling Theory Essay

    837 Words  | 2 Pages

    Lacking the necessary support, many start to devalue the importance of doing well in school deciding that perhaps school isn’t part of their identity. In Susan’s case she’s eliciting multiple forms of subordination, and within each dimension she’s being subjective to different types of oppression; racial oppression, gender oppression, and class oppression, she’s experiencing cultural alienation and isolation and is not only based on her ethnicity as a Latina but is also influenced by how she is treated as a female, as a member of a certain socioeconomic class, and in relation to her English language proficiency, and even her perceived immigration status. In this sense, students like Susan experience different forms of discrimination or marginalization that stems from

    Read More

  • Problems in the Inner City Schools

    2038 Words  | 5 Pages

    Meanwhile, as the pressure of schools losing their students due to dropout, it is important that the inner city students have the support they need in school or at home, because many years of oppression have kept African-Americans from having the will to do better. Now young African-Americans have that same oppressed feeling in the schools that they are attending. When the students give up it seems as though everyone around them wants to give up. In fact, “In many parts of the country, the problems present withi...

    Read More

  • Sociological Issues In Freedom Writers, By Erin Gruwell

    816 Words  | 2 Pages

    Erin Gruwell began her teaching career at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California where the school is integrated but it’s not working. Mrs. Gruwell is teaching a class fill with at-risk teenagers that are not interested in learning. But she makes not give up, instead she inspires her students to take an interest in their education and planning for their future as she assigned materials that can relate to their lives. This film has observed many social issues and connected to one of the sociological perspective, conflict theory. Freedom Writers have been constructed in a way that it promotes an idea of how the community where the student lives, represented as a racially acceptable society. The film upholds strong stereotypes of

    Read More

  • The 60s (movie)

    2037 Words  | 5 Pages

    This movie is a wonderful production starting from 1960 and ending in 1969 covering all the different things that occurred during this unbelievable decade. The movie takes place in many different areas starring two main families; a very suburban, white family who were excepting of blacks, and a very positive black family trying to push black rights in Mississippi. The movie portrayed many historical events while also including the families and how the two were intertwined. These families were very different, yet so much alike, they both portrayed what to me the whole ‘message’ of the movie was. Although everyone was so different they all faced such drastic decisions and issues that affected everyone in so many different ways. It wasn’t like one person’s pain was easier to handle than another is that’s like saying Vietnam was harder on those men than on the men that stood for black rights or vice versa, everyone faced these equally hard issues. So it seemed everyone was very emotionally involved. In fact our whole country was very involved in president elections and campaigns against the war, it seemed everyone really cared.

    Read More

  • The Segregation of America's School System

    1026 Words  | 3 Pages

    Even when low-income schools manage to find adequate funding, the money doesn’t solve all the school’s problems. Most importantly, money cannot influence student, parent, teacher, and administrator perceptions of class and race. Nor can money improve test scores and make education relevant and practical in the lives of minority students. School funding is systemically unequal, partially because the majority of school funding comes from the school district’s local property taxes, positioning the poorest communities at the bottom rung of the education playing field. A student’s socioeconomic status often defines her success in a classroom for a number of reasons.

    Read More

  • The Powerful Messages Delivered in The Freedom Writers

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    “We fight each other for territory; we kill each other over race, pride, and respect. We fight for what is ours. They think they’re winning by jumping me now, but soon they’re all going down, war has been declared.” Abuse, Pain, Violence, Racism and Hate fill the streets of Long Beach, California. Asians, Blacks, Whites and Hispanics filled Wilson High School; these students from different ethnic backgrounds faced gang problems from day to night. This movie contains five messages: people shouldn’t be judgmental because being open-minded allows people to know others, having compassion for a person can help people change their views in life, being a racist can only create hate, having the power of the human will/goodness to benefit humanity will cause a person to succeed at any cost and becoming educated helps bring out the intelligence of people.

    Read More

More about Freedom Writers Diversity

Open Document