The Winter 2025-26 Mountain Classroom group officially began their off-campus term this week, departing campus earlier this week on a snowy December morning. They will spend the next three weeks across northern New England – skiing, building community, completing a mini winter expedition in the White Mountains, and earning Wilderness First Aid certification – before heading west following the holiday break. Over the course of the winter term, they will travel through the American Southwest, immersing themselves in landscapes and cultures far removed from Proctor's campus in Andover, NH.
The documentary below offers a window into the experience. Mateo '25 spent his Winter 2024-25 term documenting Mountain Classroom – interviewing fellow students and instructors, capturing the daily rhythms of backpacking through desert wilderness, canoeing the Rio Grande, and visiting Indigenous communities across the South and Southwest. He then shaped that footage into a documentary film as his Senior Project. The result is a thoughtful exploration of what happens when learning moves beyond the traditional classroom.
The Depth of Shared Experience
What strikes viewers watching Mateo's documentary is how consistently students return to common themes – for example, the depth of connection that emerges when a group navigates unfamiliar terrain together, both literal and figurative. Sharing a tent after a long hike through the Superstition Wilderness, cooking over an open fire along the Rio Grande, processing a visit to the Choctaw Nation in evening reflection – these shared experiences, guided by instructors, forge relationships that differ in kind from typical high school friendships. "We all really understand each other on a deeper level than we would at school," Tess '25 reflects. Jane '25 puts it simply: "The people make the place."
Living with eleven other people for ten weeks – without phones, without the usual escapes, sharing tents and meals and challenges – creates space for genuine knowing. As Jane ’26 explains, "Everyone's there with open arms to catch you when you fall." The Mountain Classroom community does not exist in isolation. Tallulah '25 wrote about the balance between what students call their "bubble" and the broader web of connections they encounter along the way. When she lost her wallet in Fort Davis, Texas, strangers jumped in to help – shop owners calling each other, the park ranger driving to their campsite the next morning with news. Although she never recovered her wallet, she wrote, "I felt disappointed but touched by their small community," she wrote, "with the same values and foundation that our Mountain group has worked so hard to create."
Learning Connected to Place
Mountain Classroom is not a series of field trips. Instructor Ted Fuell described it as "truly experiential education that you are learning immersed in the places that you're traveling. Everything you're learning is connected to the things you're seeing and doing every day.” Students don't read about desert water scarcity in a classroom and then visit the Southwest as an illustration. They carry 124 liters of water through the wilderness, canoe 33 miles down the Rio Grande, and watch javelinas and coyotes move through camp at dusk. They visited Indigenous communities, practicing what Whistler '25 called the most valuable skill: "to listen, really listen, without trying to fix or explain or compare."
Liam '25 wrote about waking at 6:00 AM to climb sand dunes with a classmate before sunrise, sledding down in the early light. "Moments like these are when I am so glad I joined this insane adventure," he reflected. "The constant exploration, movement, and adaptation that takes place is what makes Mountain Classroom one of a kind."
The Science of Awe
What students who have participated in Mountain Classroom describe – the sense of smallness before vast landscapes, the heightened awareness of interdependence, the clarity about values and self – aligns with a growing body of research on the importance of time in nature and its impact on human psychology. Awe emerges whenever we encounter something that exceeds our ordinary frame of reference – a canyon that dwarfs human scale, a night sky unpolluted by light, or a community whose generosity challenges our assumptions about strangers.
Psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues have studied these moments. Their research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that these experiences reliably trigger what researchers call the "small self,” or self-transcendence, a diminishment of individual self-focus that paradoxically expands one's sense of connection to others. Participants who spent time in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees showed measurably increased generosity and ethical behavior compared to those who stood in the same location looking at a building.
Ava '26 described this phenomenon after her five-day solo in Arizona's Cascabel region: "I've learned humility when I look out from a summit and realize how small I really am in the greater picture of things." That sense of smallness, she noted, didn't diminish her – it clarified what mattered. For adolescents in the midst of figuring out who they are and what they value, encounters with vastness offer fertile ground for this work in ways that traditional education alone cannot.
Intentional Challenge
"How can this program help you be the best version of yourself that you can be in this world?" asks Ted Fuell in Mateo's documentary. It is a question that frames the entire experience as not only what students will learn in the conventional sense, but who they might become through the process of learning. That process involves deliberate discomfort. Students know from the outset that the program will be physically demanding, that they will leave their phones behind, and live in close quarters with the same group for ten weeks without a break. "There are a lot of challenges that are intentionally built into the program," Mountain Classroom Director Kayden Will explains in the film. "And I think that's also where a lot of the growth happens." Ted Fuell adds: "If it was an easy thing, it wouldn't be worth doing."
The Launch of Mountain Classroom Winter 2025-2026
Yesterday’s departure marks another group beginning the Mountain Classroom journey. Over the coming weeks, they will begin to discover what students from last winter and spring found (and generations of Mountain Classroom participants understand) – that learning happens differently when immersed in a natural landscape or community external to Proctor, we come to know each other most deeply through time and shared challenge, and feeling “small” before something vast can clarify what matters most.
"Mountain Classroom is a really important experience, formative experience, transformative experience... as you're really learning to define yourself and your values and your role in a community and in the world."
~ Mountain Classroom Director, Kayden Will
Learn more about Proctor’s Off-Campus Programs
For current Proctor students and families, completed applications are due by noon on December 17, 2025 (except for applications for Proctor en Monteverde, Costa Rica – due by April 15, 2026). Please reach out to on-campus Program Directors, the Academic Dean, or your student’s advisor with any questions.
- Mountain Classroom
- Off-Campus Program