Freedom Writers

Ms. Gruwell, an extraordinary teacher, saw potential in her students when no one else had. She succeeded at guiding them to make better decisions and bringing them together. However, although a seemingly daunting and impossible task, Ms. Gruwell’s teaching methods can be applied to all teachers and classes and are not impossible; her intervention can effectively be implemented by any teacher. Realistic Conflict Theory and Social Identity Theory are applied to describe the various conflicts in Ms. Gruwell’s class, and how she overcame such conflicts with multiple exercises and tremendous concern for the well-being of her students.
Freedom Writers (2009), takes place in the 90’s at Woodrow Wilson
High-School, and follows Ms. Gruwell, a new teacher, and her class: room 203. Her class, a seemingly troubled bunch, are all involved in different gangs that are based on ethnicity; this results in their poor academic grades and a lack of concern for schooling, as well as acts of violence amongst the students. By caring for the students’ well-being and implementing different and interactive exercises in the classroom, the students begin to work together and form a new social group within that classroom; one that accepts each other inside and outside of room 203.
Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT) comes about when competition between scarce resources/limited territories arises, usually within minority groups (Taylor, class notes). It is an “economic theory of intergroup behavior that assumes three central assumptions about human behavior” (Taylor, 1994). The three assumptions of RCT posit that people are ultimately selfish beings and will always attempt to maximize their own rewards before thinking of others, that incompatible group inte...

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...tervention in Freedom Writers. By implementing many social activities that forced the class to work together and form relationships, she successfully implemented RCT. Also, by giving the students diaries to express themselves properly, as well as genuine care for their well-being, Ms. Gruwell allowed them to develop a more positive self-image of themselves, thus successfully implementing SIT. These methods could be applied by any other teacher. Ms. Gruwell worked hard to have her students realize there was no benefit in stereotyping each other based on their ethnicity. However, she could have taken that one step further and attempted to make the rest of the school realize that there was no point in stereotyping her students; especially her fellow teachers, who looked down on room 203, and stereotyped them as “dumb” and “violent” students, until the end of the movie.