NORTH ANDOVER — Teaching, travel, learning and adventure call out to North Andover’s Klipfel family.
Also baseball. The crack of a bat and crowd’s shouts in a distant stadium.
Fourth grade teacher Julie Klipfel, 34, heeded the first four callings earlier this school year on a expedition to the southernmost part of Patagonia in South America.
She rode wind and waves on a 6,000-mile adventure between Oct. 22 and Nov. 2, on a National Geographic Grosvenor Teaching Fellowship.
Klipfel — a Howe-Manning Elementary School teacher in Middleton — and three other teachers from across North America joined the storied magazine’s photographers, naturalists and other experts.
Klipfel stood among glaciers and elephant seals in a place where warm equatorial air and frigid Antarctic air clash, where winds blow as strong as anywhere on Earth.
Also, where glaciers recede and seals lounge on beaches among heaps of plastic straws, bags and bottles.
Far beyond the Howe-Manning classrooms, far beyond where their yellow school buses travel, lies the region, belonging to Argentina and Chile, bounded by the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
Klipfel brought along her students through daily virtual reports.
Her mom, Paula Klipfel, a retired elementary school teacher, hand delivered her daughter’s accounts.
Klipfel’s mother, who lives in North Andover, served as the substitute teacher for her daughter’s class when the 34-year-old traveled to the most remote parts of Patagonia aboard a small cruise ship.
The vessel’s smaller crafts, Zodiacs, bounced over waves for up-close exploration of glaciers and fjords and wildlife, including the elephant seals and penguins.
Each day, the older Klipfel showed the students where their teacher was and what she was doing, displaying text, video and photos on an electronic smart board.
During the day, when she ushered the kids to lunch or another location, they would stop at the big updated map on the wall by the office and gymnasium.
“We’d stop and I’d say, ‘Let’s take a look, where is Miss Klipfel today?’” the substitute said.
She played an Explorer Bingo game with the class. When students heard about an activity their teacher had taken part in, they would stamp the matching square.
The younger Klipfel graduated from North Andover High School in 2007, and has traveled to four continents and many states.
Her travel bug began early. She and her two brothers and their mother and father would visit different Major League Baseball stadiums in summer. Her father, John, who died when Julie was young, loved baseball, as did Julie and her brothers, John and Kevin, and their mom.
Later, after Julie’s freshman year in college at Salem State University, she traveled to Norway, where a friend from school lived.
In her senior year, she did her student teaching internship in North Andover. It was a 5th grade class at the Sargent School; the same school she attended while growing up. Hers was the first class to complete grades 1-5 there.
The young instructor knows first-hand how teachers can have a positive influence on students. All her North Andover teachers influenced her, as did her mother.
“Then it was a natural curiosity about the world and a want to explore it that has fueled this passion and the way I incorporate environmental education into my own classroom,” she says.
Her Howe-Manning classroom, Room 216, calls out to the curious.
Art, humor and nature all have a place. Geography, too. Especially geography.
A stuffed Curious George sits next to a smart board. Beaded Indian pillows rest below blue and white pompoms.
A pink cursive hashtag sticker on the wall reads #keep going. Under it stares a pair of googly eyes.
Klipfel’s “Meet the Explorers!” bulletin board is dedicated to her students and the spirit of discovery.
The fourth graders have pinned explorer cards to the board. On each handmade card is their photo, an action portrait framed by art of their making.
The colored pictures include a Ferris wheel, mountains, trees, animals, water and skies. At the bottom, each student identifies the place they are exploring.
Her trip has inspired student memories.
“I will remember that Miss Klipfel actually got to touch a glacier,” student Noah Boucher said.
“I always wondered what she was doing and how she slept during the boat ride,” classmate Aubrey Grella said. “I will never forget the moment she came back because it made me feel amazing to have her back.”
“I will always remember the video she sent us while she was there, because it was so windy, she could barely walk on the boat,” Tessa Cammarata added.
Students have been creating memories since Klipfel’s return, albeit memories generated by electronic dazzle-do.
Klipfel captured 360 videos from Patagonian locations. The videos are immersive, rendering sites, sounds and landscapes from the end of the world as lived experiences when students don VR headsets.
“Students loved ‘standing’ on the beach with me in Patagonia watching the elephant seals and seeing the Bernal Glacier up close through the use of VR headsets,” Miss Klipfel says
After taking off the headsets, students researched what they had seen.
The learning has made an impression. A student nominated her for a Boston Red Sox Most Valuable Educator Award. She was selected and will be recognized April 27 at the pre-game ceremony, then watch the Red Sox play the Chicago Cubs.
All together, 50 teachers were selected for National Geographic Grosvenor Teaching Fellowship expeditions to distant and remote locations across the globe.
Klipfel’s class has been working with their global partners — students in England — to make a Google Earth project.
She has been teaching elementary school students for 13 years in Middleton, and has been using National Geographic photos and stories and videos all those years.
Among the lessons she teaches kids is that they have a voice and can make a difference in the world. The young students will be the generation that helps clean up the plastic and other pollution that litters the remote areas she visited, she said.
Klipfel said one lesson she learned after being selected for the National Geographic experience was not to underestimate yourself.
Some 12 years ago, when she was in her first years of teaching, her mom sent her information about the National Geographic Lindblad Expedition program.
At the time, Klipfel said she looked it over and thought, “No way I would be picked for this.”