Brown County High School history teacher Emily Lewellen has received another state honor. She was named the 2021 Indiana History Teacher of the Year by Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The award is presented annually by “the nation’s leading organization dedicated to K-12 American history education,” a press release states.

This year 8,510 nominations for the History Teacher of the Year award were submitted by students, teachers and administrators nationwide from elementary through high school. Lewellen was then selected from a “very competitive field” to be named the teacher of the year for Indiana, according to the release.

This fall, Lewellen will be put into a pool of state winners to vie for the National History Teacher of the Year award.

Lewellen has been teaching in Brown County since 2013 and has represented Brown County on the national and state levels multiple times already.

Earlier this year, Lewellen was selected to work on a project with the National History Day program. She and 14 other selected teachers from across the country worked with NHD and the Library of Congress staff to write and test five student guides based on the NHD project categories: documentary, exhibit, paper, performance and website. The guides “will help students find, analyze and integrate primary sources from the Library of Congress into their NHD projects.”

Previously, she participated in the Memorializing the Fallen program where she studied World War I in France. She also participated in the Operation Liberty program where she traveled to the Netherlands with a student to study World War II. She also has written a lesson plan for an NHD collaboration with the National Endowment for Humanities.

Lewellen was asked to represent Indiana on the Women’s Suffrage Float in the 2020 Rose Bowl parade in California. That year was the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women their right to vote.

At the school district’s 2018 Veterans Day program, Lewellen was named Teacher of the Year for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6915 in Brown County. Her students nominated her for the award, and Lewellen then had to write an essay detailing her work with veterans in the schools and in the community. She was selected as the district competition winner, then named the 2018-2019 High School Teacher of the Year by the VFW for the entire state.

For this most recent award, Lewellen will receive a $1,000 award and an archive of American history books, along with educational materials from Gilder Lehrman. She also will be recognized at a state ceremony.

On Sept. 9, the 10 finalists for the National History Teacher of the Year award will be announced and the national winner will be announced later that month.