Over a three-year collaborative partnership involving university researchers, government curriculum specialists, and school division teams and educators, this post-qualitative study has engaged a diffractive methodology to research pedagogical change in relationship to a renewed provincial curriculum framework in English Language Arts (ELA). In the data from focus groups, online surveys, and interviews, assessment has emerged as an ethical space of pedagogical, epistemological, and ontological tension and concern. Drawing on research in applied linguistics and digital literacies, and theoretical work in new materialism and Indigenous philosophies in education, a conceptual framework is proposed for emplacing assessment that assumes a relational ontology. Understanding language and literacy practices as produced in and through dynamic social-material-semiotic environments, this article explores how emplacing assessment opens up a dialogue for creating more ethical and responsive relationships in assessment, teaching, and learning.