Shore named Art Educator of the Year
Department of Educational Leadership professor Rebecca Shore is the North Carolina Art Education Association (NCAEA) Art Educator of the Year for higher education.
Shore, who was among the honorees at the NCAEA’s recent professional development state conference, received the award given to exemplary art educators and advocates in a variety of educational levels and fields.
Dawson Hancock, associate dean of the College of Education, called Shore a “superior teacher. She works hard to understand her students so as to be certain to meet their needs. When teaching, she involves her students completely in the learning process. Her dynamic style in the classroom captures and maintains the attention of her audience and results in extraordinary learning outcomes.”
Through her work in the Department of Educational Leadership, Shore teaches future administrators and instructors to value the arts.
“I try to empower arts teachers to become curricular leaders in their schools and to help infuse the arts throughout the curriculum, using a more arts-based approach in strategies – ‘doing’ rather than listening or just reading and writing,” she said.
Shore’s advocacy for the infusion of arts into the American educational system is also evident in her teaching in the college’s Aspiring Principals Program.
A student who took an instructional leadership course under Shore last summer said she gained a different perspective on the role of an occasionally underappreciated subject. “I have two visual arts teachers in my building, so I am planning to reach out to each of them and find ways to connect across the curriculum. I have a new-found appreciation of the arts, particularly as it relates to increasing academic success.”
Shore’s commitment to the arts is built on an extended history of research into how the human brain learns. The former principal and choral director uses cognitive science to investigate what happens in developing brains and in the process dismantles many long-held assumptions about what works and what’s possible in education.
Her new book, “Developing Young Minds: Conception to Kindergarten,” which explores these issues, was published earlier this year.
“This book can help both parents and educators reflect about many aspects of the nature of childhood in our culture, said Rich Lambert, director of the Center for Educational Measurement and Evaluation at UNC Charlotte, “The material is not only highly engaging but contains a wealth of ideas about delivering educational activities in a way that enhances their cognitive complexity and maximizes benefit for young children.”
Shore dedicates an entire chapter of “Developing Young Minds” to the arts, a discipline she stated can “greatly enrich the insatiable quest for learning by the infant brain. Be it exposure to visual, auditory or tactile and kinesthetic varieties of stimulation, as long as the engagement is developmentally appropriate, experiences in the arts will generally be a welcome addition to the baby’s world.”
Shore has shared her research on neuroscience and education in scores of publications, at academic conferences and in local schools. In her utopian schools of the future, “the curricular umbrella under which all subject areas occur would be an understanding of how the brain learns,” Shore said. “When we more fully understand this paradigm shift, we will be unable to resist placing the arts high on the priority lists of curriculum, along with moving and engaging with content, because this is what cognitive science and neuroscience show are better for learning.”