By Nishta Subramanian, Staff Reporter
Wanting to teach Hispanic culture not just from textbooks but through field trips and projects, Conestoga’s Spanish department organized a field trip for Spanish 4 students to The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on March 3. Forty-four students went on the field trip, learning and connecting to their three class units about famous Spanish artists.
Until this year, the class field trips for Spanish students had been suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Spanish and French teacher Alice Havrilla planned this trip for the first time this year, taking inspiration from the French class trip to the Barnes Foundation, an art museum in Philadelphia.
“The goal of the trip was to get a feeling of what paintings from these artists that we’ve been talking about in class look like in person,” Havrilla said. “My hope is that students can recognize (the paintings) in the museum, and feel like, ‘Oh, wow. This is something that we did in class that’s so cool. I recognize this characteristic about this artist.’”
Having emphasized different Hispanic artists in class, the Spanish 4 teachers gave the guides at MoMA a list of artists the classes learned about, and they chose the best paintings and art to showcase. Some unique artists that the classes studied were Diego Velázquez, Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero.
“If somebody really likes history or introspection into an artist, the guides are trained professionals, and they can tell them more about it, maybe some fun facts that I wouldn’t know to tell them in a lesson,” Havrilla said.
The itinerary for the day consisted of a two-hour chartered bus ride to New York, a guided tour of Spanish artists in MoMA, then a 10-minute walk to The Hugh food court in Manhattan and finally the bus ride back to Conestoga. Sophomore Chloe Proud attended the field trip and enjoyed seeing the different paintings in the museum.
“We got a tour from a tour guide in the museum, which I thought was really cool because we learned more about the pieces than we would have if we had just walked around,” Proud said. “My favorite part of the day was walking around and being able to see all the different kinds of art.”
Nishta Subramanian can be reached at [email protected].
