On Thursday, Sept. 25, Upper School students assembled to learn about school-sponsored travels this spring.
For freshmen, trips to the San Diego–Tijuana border and Joshua Tree will join the previously offered options of a journey across California and a trip to Portland.
Blake Masi, a new photography teacher who is co-leading the border trip this year, shared his vision: an exploration of culture through landscape photography.
“[Landscape]’s shaped by a physical border that is manmade, built and wedged in this space,” Masi said. “Who is saying where that should be?”
Sophomores will return to Hawaii this year with long-standing trips to Big Island, Kauai, and Oahu.
“Ultimately, the focus is on informed and insightful interactions with real-world context, communities, and culture and a skillful and contemplative approach to engagement with others across commonalities and differences,” sophomore dean Jessie Dubreuil said.
The specifics of each trip are still in development, but Dubreuil hinted that a wider variety of options will be available in comparison to last year—among them a potential wayfaring-based trip in Maui and two separate project strands in Oahu.
This year, both freshman and sophomores will have the increased agency of choosing trips unattached to advisory.
Juniors’ options—trips to Alaska, New Orleans, the American South, New York, Atlanta, Guam, and Puerto Rico—are equally exciting.
One trip, the one to remote Alaska, is led by Sarah Koning, Nueva’s environmental director. Students will spend a week in “communal wilderness” in Alaska’s natural landscape.
“24 hours a day for seven or eight days—you can see new bonds forming,” Koning said. “It’s an amazing trip no matter what because of the landscape and because of the organization we work with.”
Allen Frost, an Upper School English teacher, will lead the trip to Arkansas and Mississippi. Through education policy, the trip will explore differences between the Bay Area and the South. “It was difficult last year to find Republicans or conservatives to meet with,” Frost said. “I want to make sure that we’re getting a greater ideological spectrum of people to talk to.”
Seniors will have eight options—all international: Bonaire, Brazil, China, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Mexico, and Taiwan.
“My goal is for students to have an experience abroad that allows them… to take away lessons that may serve them in and outside of our community here at Nueva, and when they graduate and go out into the world,” wrote 12th-grade dean Phil Moreno in an email.
Spring trips strive to go beyond tourist experiences: each year, they offer a chance to thoughtfully explore pressing issues and reflect on our community and the world around us.
