The National Council of Teachers of English believes the following about writing and believes that all student writers, including the youngest writers, have the following rights:
- Writing is a form of identity and voice.
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- Students have a right to see themselves as a writer.
- Students have a right to their words and ideas without fear of censorship and with respect for others’ ideas and identities.
- Students have a right to decision-making in their creativity, voice, and expression of ideas.
- Students have a right to use a variety of languages, to translanguage, and to codemesh in representing their identities.
- Writing serves a variety of purposes and audiences.
- Students have a right to use writing as a tool of expression, inquiry, and learning in all grade levels, classes, and disciplines.
- Students have a right to write for a variety of purposes and in ways that are not singularly constrained or prescribed by teachers, curricula, or testing expectations.
- Students have a right to opportunities to write for diverse audiences, including teachers, peers, and both in-school and out-of-school communities.
- Students have a right to pursue publication opportunities for their work.
- Writers compose using different modes, tools, and processes.
- Students have a right to write in a variety of mediums, modes, and literacies, including the linguistic, aural, and visual literacies of drawing and text-based writing.
- Students have a right to learn responsible and effective uses for new technologies, including AI.
- Students have the right to engage in the processes of composition using diverse tools and strategies that honor how meaning is made.
- Writers learn within communities.
- Students have a right to write in purposefully built and supportive communities.
- Students have a right to constructive, productive feedback from thoughtful readers, and they have the right to develop strong reflective skills to assess their own writing.
- Students have a right to write for feedback from teachers and peers and also for personal reflection or expression.
- Students have a right to effective, intentional writing instruction in a community that builds student agency, confidence, and choice in writing.
- Writers make choices.
- Students have a right to choice and control, as much as possible, over topics, forms, genres, language, themes, processes, and other aspects of their own writing.
- Students have a right to exercise editorial control, especially when writing for school publications such as school newspapers, literary magazines, and podcasts.
In support of the rights of student writers of all ages, teachers of all content areas, administrators, schools, and districts should do the following:
- Provide intentional writing instruction.
- Teachers should provide students with high-quality writing instruction in a range of content areas, mediums, modes, and genres.
- Teachers should support students’ explorations of a broad range of types of writing that communicate for and to a range of purposes and audiences.
- Teachers should engage students in writing processes that allow them to fully formulate and evaluate ideas, develop voice, experiment with syntax and language, express creativity, elaborate on viewpoints, and refine arguments.
- Districts should support instructional time for writing in parity and coordination with reading and content instruction.
- Foster responsibility and ethical choice-making in writing processes and products.
- Teachers should foster in students an understanding and appreciation of the responsibilities inherent in writing, including attribution practices and publication, by encouraging students to assume ownership of both the writing process and the final product.
- Districts should encourage the development and adoption of policies, including around AI, that support student writers as they take responsibility for their process and products and learn to make ethical choices in their writing in order to express their intended purposes and speak to their intended audiences.
- Support teachers in professional learning.
- Teachers across all levels and disciplines deserve the opportunities and time for personal and professional development around writing and writing instruction, to participate in ongoing learning related to writing, and to write themselves.
- Teachers deserve preparation and administrative support to foster student agency and respond effectively when students write content that may be censored or challenged.
Theoretical Grounding
Students’ right to write is grounded in the researched principles of writing and writing instruction as named in NCTE’s Understanding and Teaching Writing: Guiding Principles (2018) and the NCTE position statement on Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing (2016). In this moment, when standardized tests, scripted curricula, and acts of censorship threaten to narrow what students can express or even think, we affirm that every learner deserves the right to write, which means using writing as a means of inquiry, reflection, identity expression, and transformation. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s vision of literacy as the power to “read and write the world,” this right builds on the writing process movement’s emphasis on voice, choice, and agency as advocated by James Britton, Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, James Moffett, Donald Murray, and others in Tobin & Newkirk’s (1994) edited collection. Extending across the lifespan (Bazerman et al., 2018), it also embraces culturally sustaining, asset-based approaches that honor students’ full linguistic and cultural repertoires (Delpit, 1995; Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017; González et al., 2005; Baker-Bell, 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2015). Students have the right to learn to write in ways that both access and challenge systems of power, drawing on their identities, languages, and communities as dynamic sources of power and knowledge that reshape what writing means and whom it serves. Upholding this right, particularly in K–12 teaching contexts, means teachers must support students as they write for diverse purposes and audiences across multiple modes and evolving technologies (including generative AI) and within caring communities of teachers and peers. In defending students’ right to write, we defend their right to think expansively, to question freely, and to use writing as a tool for truth-telling, creativity, and justice throughout their lives in a democratic society.
References
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge.
Bazerman, C., Applebee, A., Berninger, V., Brandt, D., Graham, S., Jeffery, J., Matsuda, P. K., Murphy, S., Rowe, D. W., Schleppegrell, M., & Wilcox, K. C. (2018). The lifespan development of writing. National Council of Teachers of English.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. The New Press.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. [1]https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 [1]
González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.
National Council of Teachers of English. (2016). Professional knowledge for the teaching of writing [Position statement]. https://www2.ncte.org/statement/teaching-writing/ [2]
National Council of Teachers of English. (2018). Understanding and teaching writing: Guiding principles [Position statement]. https://ncte.org/statement/teachingcomposition/ [3]
Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. [4]https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244 [4]
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
Tobin, L., & Newkirk, T. (Eds.). (1994). Taking stock: The writing process movement in the ’90s. Boynton/Cook.
Additional Suggested and Related Resources for Teaching Writing
Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. (Eds.). (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts in writing studies. Utah State University Press.
Applebee, A., & Langer, J. (2006). The state of writing instruction in America’s schools: What existing data tell us. Center on English Learning and Achievement.
Dean, D. (2021). What works in writing instruction (2nd ed.). National Council of Teachers of English.
Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. Oxford University Press.
Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools. Alliance for Excellent Education.
Graham, S. & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve. Alliance for Excellent Education.
Koster, M, Tribushinina, E., de Jong, P. F., & van den Bergh, H. (2015). Teaching children to write: A meta-analysis of writing intervention research. Journal of Writing Research, 7(2), 299–324.
National Council of Teachers of English. (2008). Writing now: A policy research brief. https://secure.ncte.org/library/nctefiles/resources/policyresearch/wrtgresearchbrief.pdf
Yancey, K. B. (2009). Writing in the 21st century. National Council of Teachers of English.
Statement Authors
Beth Rimer, chair (Miami University, OH)
Monica Baldonado-Ruiz (San Diego State University, CA)
Rebekah Buchanan (Western Illinois University)
Christina L. Dobbs (Boston University, MA)
Jason Griffith (Penn State University)
Carmela Valdez (Perez Elementary, Austin, TX; The University of Texas at Austin)
Pamela Mason (Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA)