Kate Anderson

Purpose-This article presents an analysis of empirical literature on classroom assessment of students' multimodal compositions to characterize the field and make recommendations for teachers and researchers. Design/methodology/approach-An interpretive synthesis of the literature related to practices and possibilities for assessing students' multimodal compositions. Findings-Findings present three overarching types of studies across the body of literature on assessment of student multimodal compositions: reshaping educational practices, promoting multiliteracies approaches to learning and evaluating students' understanding and competence. These studies' recommendations range along a continuum of more to less structural changes to "what counts" in classrooms. Research limitations/implications-This review only considers studies published in English from 2000to 2019. Future studies could extend these parameters. Practical implications-This analysis of the literature on assessing student multimodal compositions highlights foundational differences across studies' purposes and offers guidance for educations seeking to revise their practices, whether their goals are more theoretical/philosophical, oriented toward reshaping classroom practice or focused on ways of measuring student understanding. Social implications-Rethinking assessment can reshape educational practices to be more equitable, more theoretically commensurate with teachers' beliefs and/or include more thorough and accurate measures of student understanding. Changes to any or all of these facets of educational practices can lead to continued discussion and change regarding the role of multimodal composition in teaching and learning. Originality/value-This study fills a gap in the literature by considering what empirical studies suggest about why, how and what to assess with regard to multimodal compositions. Introduction Attention to multimodal compositions in the field of English Education has proliferated over recent decades. Multimodality-meaning making and texts that incorporate multiple modes, or different channels of communication-is a hallmark of learners' practices (both in and out of schools) with screen-based multimodal texts (e.g. videos, videogames) and non-digital forms (e.g. signs, collages, live performances). Many studies have discussed the benefits of students' multimodal composition, or the creation of texts (broadly defined) using multiple Students' multimodal compositions

Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic
and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication,
and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself
(e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring
educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is
defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often
left implicit which can lead to murky relations to larger ontoepistemological
questions of how we construct findings from
data as well as the nature of policy. In this interpretive analysis,
we synthesize a corpus of 37 peer-reviewed journal articles that
bring together educational policy and analyses of discourse from
varying theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to
better understand the breadth and scope of how discourse is
defined and operationalized in studies of educational policy,
including in ways that are sometimes incommensurate with
authors' stated theoretical and methodological positions. After
first laying the theoretical groundwork for analyses of discourse
in the field of educational policy, we then illustrate how discourse
analysis is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, within
contested paradigmatic landscapes. We conclude with an argument
for discussions across theoretical frameworks and methodological
paradigms about how the concept of discourse lends itself
to different epistemological vantage points on educational policy.

This article explores faculty perspectives at three colleges of education regarding strategies of knowledge mobilization for
scholarship in education (KMSE), with consideration for the opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and
organizational capacities for change. Faculty surveys (n = 66) and follow-up interviews (n = 22) suggest two important
trends: First, KMSE presents both a complementary agenda and a competing demand; second, barriers and uncertainties
characterize the relevance of knowledge mobilization for faculty careers in colleges of education. This study empirically
illuminates the persistence of long-standing challenges regarding the relevance, accessibility, and usability of research in
colleges of education housed in research-intensive universities. While KMSE holds promise for expanding the reach and
impact of educational research, scholarly tensions underlying these trends suggest that individual and organizational efforts
will suffice only with modifications to university procedures for identifying what counts as recognizable, assessable, and
rewardable scholarly products and activities for faculty careers

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students' multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students' literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

This article presents a reflexive and critical discourse analysis of classroom events that grew out of a cross-cultural partnership with a secondary school teacher in Singapore. I aim to illuminate how differences between researcher and teacher assumptions about what participation in classroom activities should look like came into high relief when put into practice. To better understand these differences, I consider the sources and outcomes of what I initially experienced as a visceral tension while observing a series of classroom events as part of a unit that our research team co-designed with a partner teacher. I consider my researcher assumptions, both initial and retrospective, and their role in shaping and sometimes clouding my analytic lens. This article considers multiple vantage points on what comes to be valued, and how, in educational research contexts. By tracing analyses across stages of research, I illustrate how observable moments in time are not phenomena unto themselves but rather are part of the ongoing, developing interpretive process. Implications speak to the importance of reflexively engaging close discourse analyses of classroom events and researchers' roles in shaping them, during and after the fact, through transparency about the recontextualization that analysis entails.

This study considers the discursive construction of a particular type of student in Singaporethe lowest-tracked, Normal Technical (NT), secondary school student. Shaped by meritocratic policies, educational practices, and ideologies common to many late-modern societies, students in the NT track are institutionally and individually constructed through the results of high-stakes testing regimes and essentialist views of ability. This article extends an understanding of the NT student as a widely held, deficit construction in Singapore by considering its use as an ideological label in interpersonal and institutional discourse. I consider how school leaders' and government commentaries about NT students' abilities, opportunities, and supposed characteristics provide insights about the processes through which students are recruited into institutional categories of deficit and riski.e. differentiated instruction, ascribed ability, and these processes' translation into educational structures and practice in the name of meritocracy. While the illustration of this phenomenon is uniquely Singaporean, implications include concerns about equity, constructions of ability, and ideologies of merit common to late modern society.

Is race a legitimate category of linguistic differentiation? In other words, can someone's race shape how they speak or how they sound to others? If so, how does this come to be? In which contexts and according to whom do links between race and speech style become assumed as real or meaningful? In this chapter, I explore various ways that linguists have attempted to answer these questions, framing the larger issue of attitudes about African American Language (AAL) and the construction of research on them.

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies—and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate these two perspectives’ methodological tensions, I present an analysis of selected recent literature from both approaches and then analyze these tensions further as they emerge in two empirical studies published in this journal illustrating each approach. Despite the fact that SFL and Situated Literacies share some underlying theoretical assumptions and are sometimes drawn upon in concert by scholars, I illustrate how they differ in their treatment of multimodal texts and practices—as well as their methodologies—research design, data collected, analytic methods, and possible implications. This article thus seeks to outline the respective contributions of SFL and Situated Literacies to ongoing research on multimodality in literacy and writing studies and to encourage a conversation across theoretical and methodological borders.

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Abstract: Digital storytelling involves the creation of short, personal narratives combining images, sounds, and text in a multimedia computer-based platform. In education, digital storytelling has been used to foster learning in formal and informal spaces worldwide. The authors offer a critical discussion of claims about digital storytelling's usefulness for supporting various types of learning and conceptualize it as a context rather than a tool. Drawing on examples from digital storytelling workshops, their research team has ...