“They hear it from me”: Student voices on critically assessing digital multimodal composing

• Grade 8 youth composed digital stories and video essays to counter social injustices. • Students used digital, multimodal and disciplinary tools to enhance critical actions. • Their rubric criteria, reflections and interviews highlighted critical DMC practices. • Student perspectives on DMC practices fostered transparency, reflection, and action. • Justice-oriented assessment helps reorient DMC practices toward social justice. This ethnographic case study investigates how student perspectives on digital multimodal composing (DMC) practices can inform a justice-oriented approach to assessment in English Language Arts (ELA). While existing research often privileges teacher perspectives in assessing DMC, this study centres the voices of two culturally and linguistically diverse Grade 8 students in a Canadian ELA classroom. Drawing on multimodality, critical digital literacies, and disciplinary literacies, we examine interviews, self-assessment reflections, student-suggested rubrics, and final DMC projects to understand how youth critically apply digital, multimodal and disciplinary tools to design digital stories and video essays that challenge social injustices. Our thematic analysis reveals that students remix digital tools, such as voiceovers, music, and visual design, not only to meet assignment expectations but also to critically engage their audience. Student perspectives on their DMC practices emphasize their multimodal and audience awareness, including intentional choices about sound, pacing, and visual impact. Students also engage in disciplinary weaving, combining self and world connections with judicious sourcing to denounce racial, cultural, and gender discrimination. These insights fostered transparency and enabled the classroom teacher to provide formative, student-responsive feedback and honour diverse ways of knowing. This study contributes to current scholarship by advancing a justice-oriented model of DMC assessment that values student agency and encourages educators to assess how students reorient digital, multimodal and disciplinary tools toward social justice. By foregrounding student voices, this study positions justice-oriented DMC assessment as a pedagogical tool capable of disrupting hegemonic norms in disciplinary classrooms.