English Education - Volume 53, Issue 4, 2021

Literacy normativities reinforce the colonial, racist, and anti-queer underpinnings of English education, and today these normativities are propelled by the English teacher imagination. To render these normativities visible, this study traces the affective reader responses of an inquiry community of queer educators and reveals normative reading practices that animate how English teachers imagine and feel their classroom worlds. In particular, ordinary affects—those that are subtly felt and often overlooked—spotlight interpretive norms and normative feelings that hide the field’s ongoing commitments to colonization, racism, queerphobia, and more. Contributing to Critical English Education (CEE), this article concludes by calling for multiple prisms of interpretation to dismantle literacy normativities in English education and ELA.

Drawing from the Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom, as well as prior scholarship on digitally mediated communication, rhetorical studies and composition, assessment, and digital literacies, this theoretical article presents a framework for creating and assessing digital multimodal compositions. The Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition conceptualizes digital multimodal composing through three interconnected and layered domains: audience, mode and meaning, and originality. Though the three domains are defined individually, they are inextricably linked within the recursive processes and products of digital multimodal composing to contribute to intended meaning. The authors describe and justify the domains, present assessment considerations, and conclude with implications for practice and suggestions for designing assessments relevant to context and task.