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NYSEC Resources for Intellectual Freedom

This document, created by members of the NYSEC executive board, and inspired by The Minnesota Council of Teachers of English (MCTE), is intended to provide New York educators with updated information, toolkits, and verified media sources regarding intellectual freedom throughout New York.

Educators across the state are working tirelessly to provide safety, support, and meaningful education in a time of significant stress and fear. As an organization created for the professional development of New York teachers of English Language Arts, we know that it is our responsibility to partner with educators to guide students through this moment with accurate, truthful, and developmentally appropriate information and support for students’ wellbeing. It is becoming increasingly more and more difficult for us to discern what is true in our media and to find accurate information to support our students. For this reason, we provide this list that includes local media reporting, toolkits for developing school response plans, and offers possible teaching suggestions for educators in and outside of our state.

We encourage educators and librarians to refer to the New York State Education Department “Freedom to Read Guidance” document, click here.

• Book Rationale Database: “This NCTE database contains more than 1,400 book rationales, which are an important resource for educators and school librarians. NCTE members can use these rationales when selecting books to incorporate in a classroom or library, or when defending a text that is being challenged.”

• Digital Literacy Teaching Resources: This site provides resources for educators looking for resources and approaches to teaching digital literacies, and writing with AI.

• Leveraging Fair Use: This document is “designed to demystify legal terminology and show educators how they can use Creative Commons resources every day.”

• NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center: “Through the Intellectual Freedom Center, NCTE has for decades offered guidance, tools, and other support to teachers faced with challenges in classrooms and schools pertaining to texts (e.g., literary works, films and videos, drama productions), student writing, and/or to teaching methods.”

• Position Statement on Media Literacy: This resource provides Media Literacy core principals for instruction.

• Report Instances of Book Banning: “The primary purpose of this report is to inform NCTE of censorship in schools and classrooms so we can remain up to date on what issues are happening throughout the country. We welcome reports from anyone who is aware of current censorship incidents in schools and school libraries.”

• The State of Literature Use in US Secondary English Classrooms: This document “details the results of a large-scale survey of more than 4,000 public middle and high school English language arts (ELA) teachers across the country. It builds on the last large-scale national study on the topic, which was published by Arthur Applebee in 1989. Researchers Kyungae Chae and Ricki Ginsberg’s findings highlight the differences and similarities in teaching literature over the past 35 years.”

• Teaching with Primary Sources: “This searchable database includes strategies for teaching with more than 150 specific items in the Library of Congress’s digitized primary source collection. The strategies were created by more than two dozen teachers and leaders in English language arts education. They articulate specific literacy merit for curriculum or classroom use, along with suggested themes, units, and state standards. Content is searchable through tags such as picturebook and argument.”