Faculty and Staff

Biography

Emily K. Johnson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of English (Technical Communication and Digital Humanities), graduate faculty in the Technical Communication MA program, and core faculty in the Texts and Technology Ph.D. program. She is co-author of Critical Making in the Age of AI (with Anastasia Salter, Amherst, 2025) and Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (with Anastasia Salter, Routledge 2022). Johnson is currently Principal Investigator of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education investigating the efficacy of five of her co-designed video games (computer and virtual reality) for language learning. Her work has been published in Communication Design Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, Computers and Education, the Journal for Universal Computer Science, and more.

Research Interests

• digital humanities 
• technical communication
• UX, UCD, human-centered design
• critical making
• educational technology
• learning games
• playful/gameful learning
• self-regulated learning
• embodied cognition
• VR, MR, AR, XR, etc.
• computer assisted language learning 

Recent Research Activities

Links to some of my research projects:

• ELLE the EndLess Learner
  • https://chdr.cs.ucf.edu/elle/games
  • https://ekjphd.com/elle/
• BeadED Adventures
  • https://ekjphd.com/beadedadventures/
    
• emPower through Play (UCF SEED funded project)
  • https://empowerucf.wixsite.com/empower
    
• And more!
  • https://ekjphd.com/
    
  • https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=duwrp5kAAAAJ&hl=en

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Selected Publications

Books

• Johnson, Emily K., and Anastasia Salter. Critical Making in the Age of AI. Amherst College Press, 2025. ISBN 978-1-943208-96-8 (Open Access). https://services.publishing.umich.edu/Books/C/Critical-Making-in-the-Age-of-AI3

• Johnson, Emily K., and Anastasia Salter. Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Game-Based Learning. Taylor & Francis, 2022.

  https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003281696/playful-pedagogy-pandemic-emily-johns...
  

Articles/Essays

• Johnson, Emily Kuzneski. "What Video Games Can Tell Us About Interactive Technical Communication." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2025): https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816251371625 

• Johnson, Emily K. “Teaching Liberatory Design.” Communication Design Quarterly Special Issue on UX Pedagogy, vol. 12, no. 3, 2024, pp. 59-70. DOI: 10.1145/3658422.3658427.

• Johnson, E.K. (2022). The Aural-Visual Rhetoric in Video Game Tutorials. Technical Communication Quarterly, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2021.2021452

• Johnson, Emily K., and Anastasia Salter. “Embracing Discord? The rhetorical consequences of gaming platforms as classrooms.” Computers and Composition 65 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2022.102729.

• Johnson, E.K., Giroux, A.L., Merritt, D., Vitanova, G., Sousa, S. (2020). Assessing the Impact of Game Modalities in Second Language Acquisition: ELLE the EndLess LEarner. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 26(8), 880-903.

Book Sections/Chapters

• Vitanova, G., Johnson, E.K., Sousa, S., Giroux, A., and Merritt, D. (2022). Gameful teaching: Exploring language teacher identity and agency through videogames. In H. Kayi-Aydar and J. Reinhardt (Eds.) Language Teacher Development in Digital Contexts. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Conference Papers/Presentations

• Kong, Yingzi*, and Emily K. Johnson. “Work-in-Progress—Cozy Games for Learning: Vocabulary Practice with Anim-ELLE Crossing.” 10th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN), 2024, https://doi.org/10.56198/U6C0WIZ5O.
  
  *student co-author

• Johnson, E.K. (2023). “It’s all the same words, but It’s not”: ChatGPT as TPC Assistant. Presented at 42nd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’23) October 26, 2023.

• Johnson, E.K. (2023). Supporting Self-Regulated Learning in a User-Centered Design Course. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1145/3615335.3623043
• Johnson, E.K. and Vitanova, G. (2023). “You have to play your homework!”: An analysis of student reflections on an educational computer game” Presented at 42nd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’23) October 26, 2023.
  

• Johnson, E.K. (2021). Just @Me: Digitally-Mediated Team Communication in a Pandemic. In 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY: 315-318. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3472714.3473658

Awards

• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Award. University of Central Florida. 2025.
  
• College of Arts and Humanities Research Excellence Award. University of Central Florida, 2025.
  
• Research Incentive Award. University of Central Florida, 2024.
• Honorable Mention: Chuck D. Dziuban Award for Excellence in Online Teaching, University of Central Florida, 2023. One winner and one honorable mention selected university-wide. 2023
  
• Champion of Undergraduate Research: Rising Star Faculty Award, University of Central Florida, 2023. One of two honorees university-wide.
• International Research and Studies Program, US Department of Education. Exploring Language Learning with Educational Computer and VR Games. $295,582. Role: PI.

Courses

• Fall 2026
• Summer 2026
• Spring 2026