Elizabeth DeMartino Newton is the Director of the Early Learning Center for Research and Practice in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

She was a mentor teacher for over a decade, working directly with children and pre-service teachers in the laboratory school context, before taking on a program leadership role. Elizabeth’s work focuses on teacher education, coaching pedagogy, and justice-oriented reflective learning contexts for both pre-service and in-service early childhood educators. She has disseminated and advocated for laboratory school pursuits at national and international conferences, and has taught early childhood education courses in the recently restructured Child and Family Studies Department and now the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education. She prioritizes identifying opportunities to interrogate both existing educational structures and traditional methodologies while systematically experimenting with innovative pedagogy. Elizabeth earned her Master of Science in Child and Family Studies, with a concentration in Early Childhood Education, from the University of Tennessee, where she discovered her passion for teacher education.