The next generation of California public school students will skip the 'mission project'

Photo: Photo Courtesy Of A California Resident Generations of California public students have built replicas of...

The fourth-grade tradition of building a California mission out of Popsicle sticks and sugar cubes is being pushed aside by the state as history lessons change to reflect all cultures and more accurately depict the past.

A new framework for the curriculum at K-12 public schools means less research into the floor plans of the mission at say San Juan Capistrano, and more time looking at what life was like for both the missionaries and the native people of California.

"What are students learning by building model missions?" asks Nancy McTygue, executive director of California History-Social Science Project and one of the lead writers of the new framework. "I don't think the mission project has taught students about a very difficult time in our nation's history."

McTygue adds: "Building a mission doesn't really teach anything of substance about the period and it's offensive to many. Attention should focus on the daily experience of missions rather than the building structures themselves."

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San Francisco Solano, Sonoma, 1823 San Francisco Solano, Sonoma, 1823 Photo: Richard Wong Photo: Richard Wong Image 1 of / 27 Caption Close The next generation of California public school students will skip the 'mission project' 1 / 27 Back to Gallery

With the new framework, the lessons around the missions and other notable periods and events in state, U.S. and world history are being revised and replaced with new ones on everything from the role of LGBTQ figures in shaping the state to how trade routes between Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe impacted nations and their people.

The changes to the Spanish colonial period include the omission of the mission construction project, long a rite of passage for 9-year-olds studying California history in the fourth grade. But while the project captures nostalgia, all the parents SFGATE heard from for this story welcome the new framework. Many disliked the assignment because it failed to address the complexities and nuances of the colonial period, while some loathed the amount of work and hassle it created at home.

"I'm sure some parents and families feel nostalgic," exaggerates Jacqui Boland, a Marin mom and the founder and CEO of Red Tricycle, in a Facebook post about the stress of the project. "Having wrapped up our 4th grade mission project a mere 8 months ago, I am still experiencing PTSD, so I would vote for a different approach."

Some parents report that their kids' fourth-grade teachers were addressing the historical period in a more sensitive way that looks at the Native American perspective even before the framework was introduced.

S.F. mom of twins Samantha Schoech says her kids studied missions in fourth-grade at a public school two years ago, and instead of building a model they created PowerPoint report on a mission that included how missionaries impacted the native people of the area.

"I was so relived they didn't have to build that dumb building (as I did back in 1980) and that they got a fuller picture of life in California at that time," Schoech wrote to SFGATE.

S.F. resident and mother of two Mia Waller taught fourth grade for 14 years, including several at Miraloma Elementary School in San Francisco, and she says she never asked students to build a model. Instead, she held what she calls a Mission Day where students were assigned traditional roles held at a mission.

"Kids would get excited because there's tortilla making, leather tooling, butter making and farming and they want to try it all," Waller says. "But to really make Mission Day accurate, everyone was assigned just one task and that's all they did. There's only one kid who could do whatever he wanted and that's the kid I put in a padre costume. Kids today get a lot of say-so," Waller says. "So to take a day and say, 'You know what, you don't get to do that" is very powerful."

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The new History-Social Science Framework, created by a team of educational researchers headquartered at U.C. Davis, was first presented in 2016, and districts, schools and teachers around California are beginning to adapt their curriculum and class materials.

San Francisco Unified School District says it's gearing up to adopt the new framework but the process of developing lessons, purchasing text materials and training teachers will take years.

"The framework modifies the existing standards and paints a picture for teachers with a more rich and nuanced perspective of history," says Brent Stephens, SFUSD's chief academic officer. "There are an immense number of events in this 1,000-page document."

Stephens says that rather than purchase new textbooks, the district will likely follow the framework's recommendation to draw from primary source material whether its journal entries, excerpts from literature or ephemera.

"The challenge is that no single textbook is likely able to cover the scope of themes in the framework and we need to think flexibly about the kinds of materials available," Stephens says.

These types of materials will soon become more readily available to California school districts and teachers thanks to a $5 million grant from the state to create an online database of teaching and learning resources for K-12 history-social science curriculum available by 2019.

Anthea Hartig is the executive director of the S.F.-based California Historical Society that's working with the California History-Social Science Project at U.C. Davis to identify, collect and make available the materials.

As a parent of two sons in the S.F. public school system and a California native herself, Hartig is thrilled that her work will help students gain a more accurate perspective of what happened at California's missions and get away from the version of history featuring the "gentle padre and grateful, subservient Indian."

The intent, Hartig says, is to "complicate that narrative and make it more meaningful and inclusive and especially to help students understand California's native people are still here and have survived phenomenally difficult, challenging and horrifying histories to become a vibrant part of California today."

Paloma Flores, SFUSD's program coordinator for the Indian Education Program, is also looking forward to helping educators find new ways of teaching the mission period and she has already assisted teachers at Cesar Chavez and Sanchez Elementary Schools in S.F. by bringing Native American artifacts into classrooms to tell the stories of California's indigenous people.

"By using that mission project and by building the dioramas, it erases the people from the current day," Flores, a member of member of the Pit River Nation (Madesi Band) /Purhepecha. "It continues to perpetuate a romanticized stereotype that we are a people only from the past. It denies our truth, our history and the reality of our contemporary issues."

This story was updated on Aug. 31, 2017, at 10:15 a.m.