Oceanside High School photography teacher Justin Moodie had always wanted to travel to Antarctica.
In February, Moodie was one of a few educators to embark on a 16-day excursion across Antarctica through the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship program, a professional development opportunity for educators in partnership with Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic Society.
The once-in-a-lifetime trek resulted from Moodie’s teaching framework expanding to encompass global issues in the classroom.
Teaching photography in the Career Technical Education Pathway at Oceanside High School, Moodie’s classes often take off-campus field trips for students to shoot photos in an urban landscape.
But beyond exploring the local world, Moodie began incorporating polar science into his curriculum.
“It really started as a personal passion and realization that young people may hear these stories about icebergs the size of Rhode Island breaking off near the poles, but they have a hard time contextualizing that information,” Moodie said. “My mission is to help them understand these places.”
Moodie had previously enrolled in the National Geographic Educator Certification course, a free online resource to help teachers expand the scope of their curriculums to include storytelling, global citizenship and activism — all concepts that Moodie was already applying to the classroom.
And Moodie’s curriculum was precisely what the fellowship was looking for, sending him with his camera on the trip of a lifetime to the world’s southernmost continent.
Traveling to the planet’s least-populated continent was not a breezy, nonstop flight. Since there are typically no regular passenger flights to the South Pole, Moodie first had to get to Ushuaia, Argentina, located on the southernmost tip of South America. From there, Moodie traveled aboard the National Geographic Explorer passenger vessel through the Drake Passage, a tempestuous body of water where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans converge between South America and Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands.
The Drake Passage has an average depth of 11,150 feet and is known to produce wave heights of approximately 30 feet.
Once they arrived in the Antarctic Peninsula, Moodie and the exploration team embarked each day onto a new beach – a thrilling experience by itself each time.
“There are no docks or piers there, so anytime we got off the ship, we would be on a small, inflatable motorboat that would pretty much just crash onto the shore,” Moodie said. “We would make wet landings by jumping into the waves, which was an amazing adrenaline rush each time.”
Before the trip, Moodie felt he knew quite a bit about his dream destination before actually arriving there. But this trip opened his eyes to new realizations about Antarctica.
“I had this very all-encompassing vision of what Antarctica would look like, but every day on the trip defied that vision,” Moodie said. “Every beach was so different from the last, and every day the continent had something different to show me – rock colors, ice formations, waves and even the weather were all different… and of course the wildlife was super interesting too.”
While in Antarctica, Moodie experienced a nearly 60-degree range of weather conditions in Antarctica, dropping as low as -30 degrees and rising as high as 30 degrees Fahrenheit, with a mixture of rain, snow, sun and clouds.
“It was interesting how quickly the weather could shift,” Moodie said. “We needed layers that we could put on and take off as we went.”
Upon his return to the classroom, Moodie shared his experiences in Antarctica with students, faculty and just about anyone interested in his travels. As part of the fellowship, he is now responsible for conducting programming tied to the trip in his curriculum that he can share with National Geographic to demonstrate how his experience provided a learning lesson.
Beyond sharing photos and details about his trip, Moodie said he could also speak to the impact of the world’s climate crisis on Antarctica.
“The Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any other part of the world,” he said. “If you go down there on a 20-degree or warmer day, you might think it feels nice, but then at the same time, the penguins are suffering, the ice is melting, and the same goes for all the other life – not just what we can see on land but also in the ocean.”
Moodie believes that every class should be teaching issues related to the climate.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we’re not taking it more seriously,” Moodie said. “It’s quite possible that everything we’re teaching our students becomes less significant if there’s not a world in which they can apply that learning… The climate projections aren’t great, and we need an all hands on deck approach to address it, so I would like to see the conversation happening everywhere so that we can’t ignore it.”
Through photography, Moodie said artists can help others appreciate the world around them, potentially motivating others to make a change before it’s too late.
Today, more and more people can share and appreciate faraway places like Antarctica without necessarily having to travel there.
“With cellphones in everybody’s pockets, we’re giving artists the means to express themselves and share their work with others in a way that we weren’t able to do in the past,” Moodie said. “I think that’s a beautiful thing – that art is no longer limited to an exclusive club.”
