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By Clara Helm
Mission San Juan Capistrano is set to launch its new “Remember the Builders: Mission San Juan Capistrano Student Education Program” for the 2023-2024 school year on Saturday, Aug. 19.
“Our program is unlike any programming in the entire state of California,” said Mechelle Lawrence Adams, the Mission’s executive director. “There’s nothing like it with its teaching respect to the past, but also moving in a forward future manner that includes appreciating many facets of history.”
The program will be previewed this Saturday, from 9:30-11:30 a.m., and an expected 100 participants will hear the new self-guided audio tour experience, “If These Walls Could Talk.”
The experience focuses on remembering those who contributed to the Mission, such as the Indigenous builders, the padres, the soldiers and more.
In the 23-stop audio tour, students are first introduced to the voice of “Grandmotherly Mission Wall,” who talks about what it’s like to have survived the 246 years since her founding. This character, Lawrence Adams said, was important for them to include, as it adds women’s voices to the male-dominated history of the Mission.
From there, the “Grandmotherly Mission Wall” takes students on a journey around the Mission with a fictional student, Jack, who Lawrence Adams said represents the children’s perspective. Along the way, they meet other historical characters such as the Indigenous people and Father Junipero Serra.
The program is focused specifically on students working on Mission studies and offers California content standards-based education for third- and fourth-graders.
Lawrence Adams emphasized that the interactivity aspect of the tour helped them reach these standards.
“We know that the standards are that we have to not preach to your kids what history is, but to lead them to ask questions,” said Lawrence Adams. “So, we approach it with questioning and letting the learner draw their own conclusions, as opposed to a top-down experience.”
The program has been in the works for the past year and has involved a variety of contributions to make the tour unique. Some of these efforts include featuring professional voice artists, students and Acjachemen resident Nathan Banda.
Creating the new tour also involved generating an engaging script, which was written by Lawrence Adams and a partner, and incorporating a musical composition by Danny Jones, Wreck it Ralph! arranger, musician and vocalist.
While kids enjoy the new youth tour, parents can simultaneously learn about the Mission through the adult history audio tour, making it an outing for everyone.
“A parent can go and take their child or their grandchild around the site and listen to their own tour, while the kids can listen to something that they might enjoy a little better,” said Lawrence Adams. “And we think it’s a great way to showcase the Mission to multiple generations.”
With about 30,000 students coming to the Mission last year, according to Lawrence Adams, she expects a great turnout for this new program, which is a rite of passage for California fourth-graders.
The “If These Walls Could Talk” experience can also be combined with adobe brick making classes and experiences such as an animal tracks class in collaboration with the Santa Ana Discovery Cube.
Lawrence Adams is passionate about making education accessible and exciting for students.
Citing common expectations for young students to be passive participants in museums and field trip locations, she expressed that the tour was made with the intention to involve students in the history of the Mission.
Something Lawrence Adams emphasized was the importance of keeping these 18th century landmarks available for students to engage with and learn from. She noted that without these institutions in place, many of which the public finds controversial, students could never learn from the choices made in history.
“A lot of teachers don’t want to come to missions anymore, because they’ve decided that missions are not a value,” said Lawrence Adams. “And so, we want to inspire teachers of this next generation to take a look at 18th century landmarks.”
To make the experience more accessible, the Mission will offer free funding for up to 150 students per day in most months of the school year. This is something that is made available to the students through the Mission’s donors and grants.
Lawrence Adams stated that this free funding was important to the Mission because of the opportunity it gives students to see features such as churches and gardens that they usually wouldn’t experience.
“We don’t want them just to get the cheapest field trip, where you just walk in and look around,” said Lawrence Adams. “It’s not fair that only those among us who have the most money can have the full experience. We all want to give an even playing field and have every child have a very similar beautiful experience.”
While the program is currently only available in English, the Mission staff is working toward having it available in Spanish within the next six months.
Each student who goes on the tour will also receive a commemorative bracelet that reads “Remember the Builders” to take home as a memento.
Using descriptors such as contemplative, humorous, reflective, and spiritual to describe the tour, Lawrence Adams gave a vivid description of what the Mission staff sees as being a new way of engaging youth in learning.
“There are moments of understanding the depth of time that the Mission represents in California history, and its resilience, and that those of us that are lucky to get to live in these times can actually learn from the past and bring our learnings to the future,” said Lawrence Adams.
