Emily Robinson has taught children, adults or both on three continents. Now she’s teaching fourth graders at Wiscasset Elementary School, sharing her love of learning with them, along with her world travels that have enriched her work, and what she has to offer her students.

“I think it’s always wonderful for children to be exposed to as many different perspectives as possible, whether that’s a perspective because you’ve been traveling or because you think in a different way, or perspective through any other experiences that you have. I think the more kids hear, the more interested and curious they become about other things. And that’s a great thing to bring to students,” Robinson, 31, said in her upstairs classroom Sept. 8.

“Every teacher does that in a different way, and one of the ways I do that is through my multi-cultural experiences.”

The daughter of Matthew and Helen Robinson, owners of Trifles in Wiscasset, Robinson earned a bachelor’s degree in Italian, with a double minor in math and French, at McGill University in Montreal. Then she moved to New York City for a year and worked in production for the HBO series “Flight of the Conchords” before heading to Miami, Florida to teach English as another language at Miami-Dade College.

From there, it was on to Santiago, Chile. Robinson taught at a language institute, where she worked mostly with businesses, and then taught at an English-immersion primary school. Working with the children, she decided that was what she really wanted to be doing. She just enjoyed going to work every single day, teaching the children, who loved to learn, as she does, she said. “I much preferred working with kids.”

Robinson went back to school, this time in Australia, where she earned a master’s degree in teaching at the University of Melbourne. Then she taught fifth grade before moving back to the states.

In her experience, Australian schools had a lot of “inquiry” or student-driven learning, “with a focus on learning skills as opposed to just the content. I think that’s really exciting,” she said. She tries to include that in her classroom, and she is finding Wiscasset is a good place to do it. “Absolutely, there’s a lot of that student-driven discussion here.”

Asked about her choices to study and work internationally, Robinson explained her family traveled a lot when she was a child, to England to visit family. “And we traveled around Europe quite a lot, so it was something that I was able to do growing up, and that I really loved.”

Although she’s a new teaching hire this year, she also worked at WES last spring as a long-term substitute.

Asked how it was going so far this school year, Robinson said she’s loving it. “There is so much support from administration and a lot of collaboration as well, which I think is really important.”

Help from the other teachers, such as information about how they deliver the curriculum, has made for an easy transition, she said. One class activity she’s starting was one she picked up in Australia. “I time” is a three-week cycle of once-a-week, one-hour sessions where each student focuses on a challenge they’ve set for themselves.

“If there’s something they really want to research, they can (do) that, or if it’s something that they want to create ... or maybe learn a new skill. I’ve had students before who wanted to learn to sew. So the challenge itself is really nice and it gives kids a lot of ownership over their learning, but you’re focusing on the learner assets they want to develop,” such as thinker, researcher or self-manager, Robinson said. A student choosing researcher may work on using multiple sources; a self-manager might focus on the planning for the challenge they’ve chosen, she explained.

Robinson plans for each cycle to have a “gallery walk” where students share their work and talk with one another about the process they went through, she said. “(‘I’ time) is just something that helps them develop their skills, and be excited as learners, as well.”

She and Chilean husband Jose Barros live in Wiscasset. He’s working on starting a Chilean wine import business. “He’s loving being in Maine,” and so is she, Robinson said. “It’s exciting, because I’ve not lived here for 13 years now, so it’s a big thing to move back.”

Robinson grew up in Arrowsic. She graduated from Waynflete School in Portland in 2003.