Skip to content Skip to main navigation Report an accessibility issue
Photo of Robin Schell with award

Congratulations to TPTE Doctoral Candidate Robin Schell, Named 2018 Vine Middle Magnet School Teacher of the Year

The Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education (TPTE) congratulates Robin F. Schell on being named 2019 Teacher of the Year at Vine Middle Magnet School, in Knoxville, TN, where she is an ESL teacher. Robin is a doctoral candidate in Literacy Studies with a specialization in English as a Second Language. Her classroom plays an important role in her research, which is evidenced in a recent Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy article she co-authored with Clara Lee Brown and Mei Ni, “Powerful Participatory Literacy for English Learners.”

“I want to acknowledge the immeasurable influence my advisor, mentor, and committee chair, Clara Lee Brown, has had on my teaching. This award would not have been possible without the knowledge and insight I gained from her about what content-based ESL should really look like, her insistence that classroom discussion, reading, and writing must always be purposefully linked, and most of all her ‘glass half-full’ instead of ‘half-empty’ mindset about the knowledge English learners bring to the classroom.”

We are so proud of Robin and the great work she does. Congratulations Robin!