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.