Erin Gruwell, founder of the Freedom Writers Foundation, will be the featured speaker Nov. 30 for the Mary E. Hensley Lecture Series at Western Kentucky University.

The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. at Van Meter Auditorium. Gruwell will discuss “How A Teacher And 150 Teens Used Writing To Change Themselves And The World Around Them.”

Gruwell is president of the Freedom Writers Foundation, a non-profit organization founded to target high school dropout rates through the enhancement of the Freedom Writers Method.

Gruwell landed her first job at Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., only to discover many of her students had been written off by the education system and deemed “unteachable.”  By fostering an educational philosophy that valued and promoted diversity, her students shattered stereotypes to become critical thinkers, aspiring college students, and citizens for change. They even dubbed themselves the “Freedom Writers” — in homage to civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders” — and published a book.

Gruwell’s capacity to convert apathy to action matters most at schools and juvenile halls, where observers can watch the expressions of troubled teens shift from guarded cynicism to unabashed hopefulness.  She and her students have appeared on Oprah, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Prime Time Live with Connie Chung, Barbara Walters’ The View, Good Morning America, and CSPAN’s Book TV. Her class has been featured on National Public Radio and in national newspapers and People magazine. Paramount Pictures released Freedom Writers in January 2007, a film based that featured Hilary Swank as Gruwell.