How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them

The title of this post is the subtitle of The Freedom Writers' Diary, which I'm reading right now (among many other things). Here's the premise, in case you've been living under a rock:

As an idealistic twenty-three-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of “unteachable, at-risk” students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust—only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers” in homage to the civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders.”

The story of these students is so overtly about the power of writing and language that I'm frankly appalled that we're not talking about it in composition studies. I keep waiting to see a thread about it on WPA-L or posts on blogs, but I've seen nothing (and if these discussions are happening and I'm missing them, do let me know). What are the implications of this story? What composing practices are taking place? What rhetorical interventions are being made? What connections can be made between expressivism (scroll down) and the writing these students are doing? What, according to these students, does it mean to write about their experiences? What are the consequences?

I am going to write a review of this book when I finish it. Maybe I'll send it to a journal. I'll either do that or post it here.