Literacy Now

Northrop, assistant professor of literacy education at Cleveland State University, Ohio, is the recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award, honoring an exceptional dissertation completed in the field of reading or literacy. To learn about 2018 award and grant opportunities, visit our Awards & Grants page.

Laura Northrop brings a former journalist’s mind-set to the field of literacy research, where she approaches each challenge like a news story, seeking a deeply contextualized understanding of the reader’s world.

After a brief stint in journalism, Northrop decided she wanted to go into education. Her first teaching job was in the Chicago public school district. Although she taught grades 6–8, most of her students were reading below a middle school level. During this time, she became increasingly interested in struggling readers, particularly in the middle school context, and she decided to pursue a PhD in education policy analysis from the University of Pittsburgh.

“I wanted to know, what’s the difference between children who enter kindergarten with low-level literacy skills, and go on to have average achievement, and those who enter with low literacy skills and continue to struggle?” Northrop recalls. She explored this question in her dissertation “Breaking the Cycle: Cumulative Disadvantage in Literacy.”

Northrop’s research focuses on teacher attrition, instructional practices, and cumulative disadvantage in literacy. She believes literacy success lies at the intersection of choice, parenting behaviors, and instructional intervention.

“It really is an alignment of child, home, and school factors. The child has to be motivated to want to be a better reader, the parents have to be on board, and teachers have to be knowledgeable enough to provide the right interventions at the right time,” says Northrop.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of ILA’s blog, Literacy Daily.

Guthrie is the recipient of the William S. Gray Citation of Merit Award, recognizing a nationally or internationally known individual for his or her outstanding contributions to the field of reading/literacy. To learn about 2018 award and grant opportunities, visit our Awards & Grants page.

John Guthrie has devoted his career to exploring what he believes is the “big, empty hole in human development for reading”—motivation.

He discovered this uncharted territory while serving as codirector of the National Reading Research Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

“The theme was motivation and engagement. We said, let’s shine a light on this topic that hasn’t gotten high awareness. What are motivators for students, and what kinds of classroom contexts and teacher practices boost motivation and engagement?” Guthrie recalls.

Guthrie’s research focuses on the positive relationship between reading motivation and literacy achievement. He says skill and will go hand in hand.

“If a student is relatively well motivated in several different ways, they then become engaged in reading. They’re putting out effort, following their passion for reading. Motivations drive effort, energy, and enjoyment,” Guthrie says.

Guthrie, who received both his master’s and doctoral degrees in educational psychology from the University of Illinois, began his career as an assistant professor of education and project director of the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to his stint at the National Reading Research Center, he has served as the director of research for ILA and director of the Center for Educational Research and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Although he retired in 2007, Guthrie is currently involved in four research projects examining motivation in digital literacy. Like the field itself, his research has evolved to reflect the increasing multimodality of 21st-century texts.

Guthrie says his research is helping to establish new tools in digital literacy engagement. Right now, he’s studying how computer systems can teach struggling readers in a way that’s motivationally adaptive (responds to the motivation of kids), helping teachers to develop practices that inspire a fuller range of motivations.

When asked how he felt about receiving ILA’s William S. Gray Citation of Merit, Guthrie says he is humbled to receive an award named after one of his idols.

“William S. Gray was my hero when I was working at ILA. He was one of my inspirations in terms of how he read and how he wrote and what he did,” Guthrie says. “It is a special honor to have this award linked to him.”

Seven years ago, Wisconsin-based seventh-grade teacher Pernille Ripp had an idea for a global collaboration project that would connect educators and students through read-aloud. An immigrant herself, Ripp believed in the power of books to break down biases and broaden understandings.

 “When I think about global collaboration—it’s because we need to make the world smaller. We need to stop being so afraid of others,” Ripp said. “We need to teach our kids about the outside world or allow them to start experiencing it.”

Since then, Global Read Aloud (GRA) has gained serious traction—reaching more than 2,000,000 students across 60 countries. For the next six weeks (ending in mid-November) educators from around the world will pick a book to read aloud to students while making as many global connections as possible through social media, video chat, blogging, and other mediums.

It’s not too late to join—just visit globalreadaloud.com to learn more and sign up, and then browse the list of resources below to get started:

• This video, which explains how Ripp was inspired to start GRA, how the movement has grown, and how your classroom can participate
• This archived Google Hangout conversation on the benefits of reading aloud, featuring Ripp, Steven L. Layne, author and professor of literacy education at Judson University in Illinois, and Jennifer Estrada, director of the HerStory Campaign for LitWorld
• The Global Read Aloud Official Board on Pinterest, where Ripp shares GRA ideas
• This open Google Sheet, where educators can contribute their own resources (or share ideas they have found online) for participating in GRA
• The official Twitter hashtag for this year, #GRA17, as well as the following, book-specific individual hashtags:

• A Long Walk to Water: #GRAWater
• A Monster Calls: #GRAMonster
• Fenway and Hattie: #GRAFenway
• Mem Fox’s picture books: #GRAMem
• The Wild Robot: #GRAWild

• The Global Read Aloud FAQ, which includes a list of tech tools, such as Edmodo, Kidblog, Padlet, and more, that can be used to facilitate global conversations
• This compilation of HyperDocs, SlowChats, lesson plans, and other teacher-tested classroom activities.

Alina O'Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.

Semingson is the recipient of the Jerry Johns Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading Award, which recognizes a long-standing commitment to engaging, student-centered teaching and support. To learn about 2018 award and grant opportunities, visit our Awards & Grants page.

When it comes to online literacy education, Peggy Semingson has always been ahead of the trends. She started her blog, Literacy Update, in 2004, before the channel had reached the mainstream. Today, she continues to shares her literacy expertise on her podcast and YouTube channel, which recently hit one million minutes of viewings.

Semingson’s success in her online channels is proof of the power of self-directed learning tools, one of her research interests.  

“I asked myself, how do we empower students to do their own learning, their own self-directed learning?” she says.

Semingson first became interested in literacy studies while pursuing her doctorate in curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. A lifelong reader and former philosophy major, she has an innate curiosity about the reading process, and spent most of her time as a student reading and writing about reading and writing.

Currently, Semingson’s research focuses on frameworks that support online literacy teacher education. She is especially interested in socially distributed knowledge in online spaces, distributed cognition, and video-mediated discussion and dialogue. Currently, she’s looking at how teachers can nurture online communities and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, which she says is more effective than passive learning.

“The teacher has to build that infrastructure for communicating and fostering a social presence,” she says.

Semingson believes the future of literacy teacher education will be more student centered. She celebrates open educational resources such as author blogs and media, videos and podcasts, free online journal articles, multimodal literacies, microlearning, and webinars that are making education accessible to a wider audience.

“The whole nature of what it means to be a teacher is rapidly changing. Students have information at their fingertips and we need to help them facilitate their own learning,” she says.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of ILA’s blog, Literacy Daily.