[Paula Duddy]



Paula Duddy is the Fine Arts Chairperson and Visual Arts Instructor at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, MA. She has participated in the technological renaissance at Xaverian as a three year member of the Technology Committee. Convinced that the computer and its accompanying technology are important art tools she has been working for the past several years to integrate new media lessons into her existing art curriculum.

Work Area

Teaching Philosophy

I consider the computer to be an art tool which offers a new window of opportunity in the relationship between the image and the image maker. Electronic imaging and access to the Web provide my art students with a new medium for self-expression. Since great creations do not emerge from a vacuum,but from traditions; I am using the Massachusetts State Frameworks as model for my new media curricula design. Technology is helping me to look at my existing lesson plans and old projects with a fresh eye.

As an artist/teacher I recognize that it has not only become essential that an art student engage in the process of electronic imaging, but it has become a prerequisite for entry into almost every field of study in the visual arts at the college level. An objective of my new-media art lessons is to integrate art across the disciplines. As my art students share electronic images on the Web they become able to communicate using a new language which is converted into electronic energy that crosses great cybernetic distances. My goal is to improve the capabilities of my students with the widest range of stimuli, content, and resources to assist them in creative problem solving and critical thinking using the tools of technology.

Technology can provide a platform in which all students are exposed to a knowledge of the arts. In art classes we are not training artists in particular ...we are training minds. Individuals who become literate in the knowledge of art forms are conversant in a world language. There is a growing need for visionaries,a need for city planners, architects, interior designers, landscapers and visual artists who are designers of all sorts. It takes training, work, experience, and intelligence to make the arts work. The tools of technology will provide me with a new medium to train budding artists and thinkers. As an art eductor I want to approach technology with a spririt of cooperative interaction rather than struggle. New media tools will profoundly influence the immediate and forseeable future of the visual arts and I would like to help my students to work in harmony with these new art materials.

DuddyP@AOL.com

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