Education Leaders Program / Gary Poulton
Gary Poulton
Western Sydney, Australia
School affiliations
"Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will, and our job is to help them make something of it."
—Ken Robinson
Gary Poulton teaches Visual Art, Photography and Design at Wyndham College, a senior high school in Western Sydney, NSW, Australia. He leads the seven-year R.E.W.I.R.E project, currently in its second phase, to establish a resource and support network for Visual Art, Photography, and Design teachers across Australia in line with the proposed National Curriculum. He previously worked two years with the Western Sydney L4L/T4L Curriculum Innovators team, training staff in the use of Adobe and Microsoft applications under the Digital Education Revolution.
Educating for life and well-being is a core part of Gary’s teaching philosophy. He believes that using technological capability intelligently and creatively can assist in enabling education "to bring forth that which is within." For him, this implies developing and nurturing the innate qualities of the individual or group to the best of his ability. These are long-term goals both for his teaching career and well beyond.
It is also important to Gary that his students know that the person teaching them practices what he is teaching. He is an actively exhibiting photographer and artist whose works can be found in a number of Australian collections. He was a semifinalist in the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize in 2010 and a finalist in the NSW Parliamentary Plein Air Photography Prize the same year. Gary provides technical support for his faculty’s staff and three computer labs. The faculty is acknowledged in education circles for its excellence, particularly in digital photographic media. Gary notes that the most important ingredients in the faculty’s success in the prestigious ArtExpress exhibitions have been Adobe products such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Adobe Bridge.