Enabling critical digital literacies through GenAI-assisted multimodal composing: A longitudinal inquiry of an ethnic minority english teacher

The importance of teaching critical digital literacies (CDL) in the era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is well documented. Yet CDL instruction remains a daunting challenge and scant attention has been paid to how language teachers enable CDL development. This study conceptualizes CDL as dynamic and multifaceted, comprising four major ways of being critical in awareness, relationship, identity and action, and documents how an ethnic minority English teacher, Norita, enabled CDL through implementing three GenAI-assisted digital multimodal composing (DMC) projects over two academic years. With longitudinal narrative inquiry as the design, this study gathered multiple sources of data from Norita and her students, including narrative interviews, informal dialogues, classroom observations, and student-authored multimodal compositions. The narrative analysis reveals a developmental and selectively focused progression in Norita's CDL enabling practice, which can be theorized as a continuum of celebrating differences, building solidarity and fostering activism. The findings also show that Norita drew upon not just her students' multicultural experiences, but also her sociopolitical awareness of being ethnic minority and her commitment to go beyond the conventional protection discourse to promote critical representation and transformation for linguistically minoritized students. Implications of how her practice can be sustained are also discussed.