Interpretation Defined

“Interpretation is a communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.” – National Association for Interpretation (US) (http://www.interpnet.com/)

“Heritage interpretation is a means of communicating ideas and feelings which help people understand more about themselves and their environment.” – Interpretation Australia (http://www.interpretationaustralia.asn.au/aboutwhatis.htm)

Unsolicited comment: These are all good definitions. The only quibble I have is with the reference to the phrase “meanings inherent in the resource.” [emphasis added.] I don’t believe that meanings inhere to resources; I think they are ascribed to them by people. A forest means something very different to me as a naturalist than it does to a logger, a timber executive, or a commercial mushroom picker (recognizing that the logger, executive, or picker may share some of the meanings that I impute to the forest).

From Beck and Cable, 1998

“Knowing and addressing the visitors’ interests does not mean pandering to any desire of the audience. For example, part of what makes natural settings attractive is the contrast they provide to civilization. Some aspects of the setting should not be compromised. But when the interests of the audience are appropriated for the site and consistent with management objectives, then interpreters are wise to attend to those interests. Those may be the only messages that the audience will receive.” (p. 22)

Interpreters in Flow

“Interpreters must understand the purpose and ramifications of what they are doing. . . . Without a sense of professional purpose we lose direction. We also lose motivation.

“Clear goals must be set at several levels. First, the agency must have a clear purpose as stated in a mission statement. What is it that the agency wants to create, to offer, to contribute? Second, the interpretive supervisor must have a clear sense of direction. His or her sense of purpose will infiltrate through the ranks of field interpreters. Third, interpreters themselves must have a clear sense of what they are striving to do. Interpreters are autonomous and self-sufficient and most of what we do is self-directed. Therefore, we are responsible for developing and continually examining our own goals for meeting the needs of visitors.

“As interpreters, ideally, we devote full attention to what we are doing in our work. We should be able to concentrate on the task at hand. This means that we should be able to have work spaces that are free of distractions. Furthermore, those areas where we perform our interpretation should be conducive to bringing forth our best efforts. Site managers are responsible for seeing that work conditions are such that interpreters can concentrate without undue disruptions.

“. . . As with others who achieve optimal experiences, interpreters must have some sense of control over their work environment. First, we must feel as if we are trusted; that there is flexibility to exercise independent judgment. Second, we must be assured that responsible risk-taking is encouraged and rewarded in our efforts to achieve excellence. Failures should be considered acceptable learning experiences. Third, we must be allowed sufficient time to foster creativity and innovation. This reflective time should be incorporated into our schedules so that we have time to think in imaginative ways. Fourth, supervisory roles should be structured to emphasize guiding, educating, advising, and encouraging, rather than regulating and controlling.

“Interpreters should be given the fullest responsibility consistent with their capabilities. This empowerment, through controlling one's own contribution to the workplace, allows interpreters to continue growing to their fullest potential.” (pp. 183-4, 186)

From Brochu and Merriman, 1996

Low Key Also Strikes a Chord

“Many times interpreters think making interpretation enjoyable means bouncing around the stage in full costume or being bubbly and vivacious. But sometimes a slower, more thoughtful approach is just as, if not more, enjoyable.” (p. 68)

From Knudson, Cable, and Beck, 1995, 2003

Chapter 6 Traditions, Principles and Challenges

“Harold Ickes [Secretary of the Interior, 1933-1945] wrote ‘. . . that [national] parks are for those who will appreciate them and not merely for the hordes of tourists who dash through them at break-neck speed in order to be able to say that they have been to Glacier or Yellowstone or some other park.’” (p. 134)

Also quoting Ickes:

“We have too much of a disposition not to allow people freely to enjoy the parks for what they can get out of them for the refreshment of their spirits and the good of their souls. Our guides insist on describing the beauties and the wonders of nature in trite and uninspired words. Nothing makes me want to commit murder so much as to have someone break in on a reverential contemplation of nature in which I may be indulging by giving me a lot of statistical or descriptive information relating to what I am looking at.” (p. 135)

Chapter 11 Self-guiding, Nonpersonal Interpretation

“The need for accuracy should be obvious - it seems pedantic to say it - but years of reading interpretive brochures prove that it must be said again: check your spelling, punctuation, grammar, factual accuracy, placement of pictures and legends, and meanings of any words that you barely know. Proofread the copy before printing it. Get several objective, independent people to proofread it. Then fix the errors - enough will show up after all of this to prove that you’re human. A low-budget trail leaflet does not serve as an excuse for carelessness with language or looseness with facts.” (p. 299)

Chapter 12 Performance interpretation

“Good interpretive supervisors will allocate sufficient time for continued learning about the resource, both for the sake of the interpreter and the visitors.” (p. 305) [p. 252 in the 2nd ed.]

“Most interpreters enjoy roving duty because they interpret features first-hand, spontaneously, and to individuals. It requires considerable knowledge and flexibility, so experienced personnel do the job best. From the perspective of park management it provides good public relations to people who otherwise might not come in contact with an interpreter. Roving interpreters often give visitors current information about hazards such as inclement weather or dangerous wildlife. They can also feature special ephemeral interpretive opportunities, such as a mayfly hatch, a shad run, a historical reenactment, or a celebration.” (p. 308) [see also Cardea & Pilcher, “Informal interpretation . . .” below]

“Ideally, give interpretive talks without using notes. Reading from paper or cards may distract and interrupt eye contact with members of the audience. Some interpreters may be tempted to write out and memorize their talks. Unless the speaker has a special talent, this will cause the talk to lose its spontaneous and conversation tone. It can also be a disaster if the interpreter forgets any segment of the presentation and finds it difficult to get back on track.” (P. 312)

Work Habits to Develop for Leadership (from Steven Covey)

“1. Be proactive: Initiate, create a vision, empower others, take responsibility for your own actions. This is one of the key characteristics of a supervisor as compared to an employee.” (p. 382)

Constant Innovation

“A second part of the model of successful organizations promotes ‘constant innovation’ (Peters and Austin, 1985). Interpreters usually fall into the category of highly creative people. Many are innovative as well. Most people do not distinguish between creativity and innovation. According to Harvard's Theodore Levitt (Peters and Waterman, 1982), creativity is thinking up new things; innovation is doing new things.

“Society suffers no shortage of creative people. The shortage is one of innovators. Creativity does not automatically lead to innovation. Creative people often tend to pass the brass tacks work to others. The creative idea-maker may even create inertia problems. The can pepper everybody with proposals, just enticing enough to arouse interest but too brief to address how to use them or how to implement them. Rare are the people who have the know-how, energy, daring, and persistence to implement ideas.” (p. 390)

Stimulating Innovation

“How can interpretive managers stimulate innovation? The key principle: promote autonomy and entrepreneurship. These two terms imply independence and self-reliance, and energy to take risks and a stake in the outcome. Innovators are usually individuals who grab an idea and run. A new idea will die if there is no backer or champion of it. The person who ‘likes’ an idea, commenting that it would be ‘nice’ is probably not its champion. It takes special involvement and energy to implement new ideas, and overcome the resistance that change provokes among any agency's many non-innovators.

“It also requires patience, persistence, and the ability to express ideas in ways that are rational to the organization. Innovative-type people may seem impatient, impulsive, irrational (or at least unable to express themselves in terms of the organization's internal interests). They therefore may be perceived as not very serious, perhaps even slightly unstable to the ‘steady’ go-by-the-book types. They therefore may not get promoted, rewarded, or even hired in organizations that do not understand what innovation is about.

“When they do get hired and have freedom to take risks, champions of ideas become pioneers - the ones crazy enough to move out ahead of others, even into territory seen as dangerous or inhospitable. Managers of many successful companies have rich support systems for innovation that allow pioneers to flourish and even compete with one another. These companies allow the mythology and hero structure to go to employees, beyond the normal hierarchy figures. They do not give them ‘just enough rope to hang themselves with’ but, instead, supply assistance so the innovators can survive to get the job done.” (p. 390)

Chapter 17 Money and Management for Interpretation

“Edwards (1979) said to keep the visitors in the forefront–even ahead of the boss, whose wishes may seem like a waste of time to customers.” (2nd ed., p. 325) [Refers to The Land Speaks: Organizing and Running an Interpretation System, by Yorke Edwards (Toronto: National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada, 1979)]

Chapter 18 Personnel and Training

“Supervisors have to be more than worn-out field interpreters. Seniority is not a good criterion for giving someone supervisory duty - it is not a gold watch job. It requires people skills plus conscientious concern for the agency's goals and productivity, a good work environment for the interpreters, and superior service to the visitors.” [Cindy Nielsen, Glacier NP, paraphrased] (p. 423)

Aims and Misfires

“The productive role of the supervisor is to achieve work through other people's efforts (OPE). Often, supervisors of interpretation feel loaded down by paperwork and scheduling, evaluating, and reporting at meetings. They wish for more contact with people, more time to be in the real museum or park or refuge environment rather than sitting on chairs. Yet, supposedly, they are coordinating and supervising the work of other interpreters.

“Here is where some bad bosses develop their problems. One type takes the OPE concept too literally, seldom doing any interpretive work, never filling in for the sick or overloaded interpreters and, therefore, gets out of touch with the front line. A few of these breeze in and out of the nature center on an irregular basis, announce the new work schedule to whoever is there, or make new arrangements for programs, or give a few other orders, and then go off for a ‘meeting’ to return a day or two later. This person is out of touch with the reality of the center but thinks that the job is one of ‘making a few key decisions’ and then issuing orders. Appraisal and coaching of program performances is ignored or put off because other things seem more important at the moment. Employees feel dictated to, but ignored. The supervisor can come off as arrogant, remote, and capricious, as well as incompetent and perhaps insecure as an interpreter. Except in the abstract, this type of boss cares little for program quality control or professional development of the interpretive staff.” (p. 424)

[Note: KB&C toned down the language in this paragraph considerably in the 2^nd (2003) edition of their book. Personally, I like the “old testament,” fire and brimstone, “some bad bosses” of the 1^st edition to the tepid “one problematic type” of the 2^nd. Nothing like calling a spade a spade.]

“Directing interpretive work involves preparing people, scheduling them, and keeping things moving. The key skill needed is that of delegation. Delegation of interpretive work requires constant, conscious effort. It is more than handing out work; it involves empowerment. The employee gets authority to perform, responsibility for the program, freedom of action, and freedom from unwanted interference. In order to empower the employee, the supervisor must have previously given the interpreter:

 •          Training in interpretive skills

•          Resources such as good location, equipment, materials, and supplies.

•          Themes for interpretation, with information on the resource.

•          Time for preparation, with the freedom and guidance to use it.

“Along with delegation comes the job of saying what is enough. When the time of the staff and the supervisor becomes overcommitted, say so. Let the agency know what will have to be cut or reallocated. Do not blindly accept new requests when at a saturation point.” (p. 425)

Staffing

“An interpretive organization needs to have well-trained, experienced staff meeting the public. Pay them well to be out front and ready to meet the clients. Praise them when they perform well. It seems odd that some public agencies send out the youngest, least experienced, least knowledgeable (and poorest paid) staff to meet and inform the ‘owners of the company’ when they visit. The experienced interpreters who know the parks or forests intimately should not emerge only to perform when a Senator or Representative or Governor or agency Director arrives for a visit. Interpretive supervision should not preclude an experienced person from front-line interpretive contacts. The customer cannot rank low in the work priorities. Why not put the best staff forward for the paying customers?” (P. 426)

Professionalism

“Several National Park Service executives have referred to GS-4 and GS-5 workers as ‘walk and talk interpreters,’ suggesting unintentionally that the real production of interpretive programs is grunt work for beginners. In other words, upward mobility in this agency may require getting out of using professional interpretive skills. Instead they ‘supervise.’ Dealing with visitors, ecology, and history becomes a sort of abstraction, as memories of the good old days. A reward system that pays the best-qualified people to not interpret, to not interact with the visitor has something wrong with it. . . .

“Fortunately, some agencies value and pay their interpreters for their skills in meeting and teaching the public - being the up-front stars of the show - not turning them into bean counters and schedule makers just as they get good at their jobs. A federal interpreter with experience and skill may well earn GS-11 pay, sometimes more, for actually interpreting. Likewise, in the private sector, the top performers get top billing, center stage, and sometimes unbelievable pay.” (p. 427)

Training and Retaining Volunteers

“Just as with staff, an agency retains volunteers by treating them with respect, by allowing them to find fulfillment on the job, and by recognizing and rewarding good work (Morris 1990; Daly 1991). Making volunteers feel that they are important parts of the team is good strategy. While training and recruiting volunteers, let them know that the agency expects and needs a steady, fairly long-term commitment. Provide volunteers with their own adequate work space, identification badges, and uniforms to build morale and camaraderie. Inform volunteers about what is going on in the organization just as one would openly communicate with the paid staff.” (p. 433)

From David T. Larsen (Larsen, 2002: 17-18)

“One of the problems with interpretation so far has been that there have been too many interpretations of interpretation.

“One caricature holds interpretation to be interpredata. A quick joke: Too often, asking an interpreter a question is like trying to take a drink of water from a firehose. All that pressure and volume can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, such an approach ignores the reality that scientists, historians, and anthropologists all use data to say something about their subject. Even more importantly, interpredata fails to help the audience make personal connections to the resource. All interpretation must be built upon accurate and comprehensive information, but if audiences were simply seeking knowledge, most would have little reason to experience the site at all.

“Another outlook describes interpretaion as interpretainment. This perspective is satisfied with a pleasant visitor experience and holds that interpretation is valuable only because it is entertaining. Certainly good interpretation needs to entertain and connect to audience interests, but interpretainment warps the concept and fails to connect the visitor to the resource. It places the resource in the same arena with Disneyland.

“Interpreganda is another. The primary goal of interpreganda is to convince the audience of the singular validity of a particular ideological or agency perspective. Audiences often know when they are being told how to think and don't like it. Interpreganda is mostly effective for visitors that already share the articulated point of view. Interpreters need to say something significant about their places, but proselytizing can do a great deal of damage.

“Finally there is interprecation. While education and interpretation are related and often overlap, there are significant differences between the two. Educational goals are usually directed at specific learning objectives. Formal education embraces, to varying degrees, testing and teacher accountability. Interpretation should support those goals. Partnerships with schools, Elder-hostels, scout, and church groups connect resources with institutions that have long-term influence over learning. However, interpretation can't be constrained by a test of knowledge at the end of a program. Learning happens in many ways outside the classroom and even outside the field trip. There must be more.” (my italics)

Food for Thought: Professional Certification

(From Merriman and Brochu, 2005):

“The certification program of the National Association for Interpretation is gaining acceptance worldwide as the standard for individual performance in the interpretive field. The organization struggled for decades to develop a meaningful certification program for its members. Surveys of the membership indicated that roughly one-third of the members strongly desired a certification program, one-third flatly refused to participate or support such a program, and the remaining third were unopposed to implementing a certification program as long as it remained voluntary.” (p. 90)

“Many organizations now require interpreters to be certified by NAI.” (p. 22)

Editorial comment: I think it would be detrimental to the heritage interpretation profession and its practitioners for any one organization to control access to employment in the field through certification, particularly given the tepid support for it amongst the NAI membership as described above. Granted, the second quotation doesn’t specify that the certification must be through NAI, but it is currently the only game in town. I have been certified at a basic level (Certified Interpretive Guide), though my years of experience should qualify me for a higher category, because my employer at the time was willing to pay for it. On my own, I could not have afforded it.

In my opinion, no one should be excluded from paid employment in heritage interpretation because they can’t afford the cost of certification. Additionally, monopolization by a single organization risks a “one size fits all” approach to interpretation, which I think would be unfortunate.

Interpretation

Knudson, Douglas M., Ted T. Cable, and Larry Beck. 2003. Interpretation of Cultural and Natural Resources, 2^nd ed.. State College, Pa: Venture Publishing. [The number of quotations I have included from the 1^st edition should indicate how highly I regard this book.]

Brochu, Lisa, and Tim Merriman. 2002. Personal Interpretation: Connecting Your Audience to Heritage Resources. Boulder, CO: InterpPress.

Serrell, Beverly. 1996. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Management

Byrd, Norma Jean. 2000. Director's Guide to Best Practices: Examples from the Nature and Environmental Learning Center Profession. Dayton, OH: Association of Nature Center Administrators.

Lindquist, Susan P. 1988. “One Approach to Getting the Most from Your Staff,” in Continuing Our Legacy: Charting a New Course (proceedings of the 1988 National Interpreters Workshop). Fort Collins, CO: National Association for Interpretation, pp. 132-134. [There are many pitfalls to being a new manager entering an existing interpretive (or other) program. Most are easily avoided, and you can save yourself considerable grief by heeding the advice in Lindquist’s article.]

Brochu, Lisa. 2003. Interpretive Planning: The 5-M Model for Successful Planning Projects. Fort Collins, CO: InterpPress. [In general, I am lukewarm on books published by NAI because they read almost like ads for the NAI certification program. I’m a big fan of this one, however.]

Merriman, Tim, and Lisa Brochu. 2005. Management of Interpretive Sites. Fort Collins, CO: InterpPress.

Sax, Joseph L. 1980. Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hultsman, John, Richard L. Cottrell, and Wendy Z. Hultsman. 1998. Planning Parks for People, 2^nd ed. State College, PA: Venture Publishing. [Though frequently contentious, if not downright combative, this book has lots of good information and ideas on planning parks that actually work for the visitors, thus minimizing people-management problems. The authors are opinionated to a degree that grates at times. Being similarly inclined, I refrain from criticizing them on that ground. Still, it may not be the best way to win friends and influence people. It is worth looking beyond their combativeness to glean the worthwhile information they convey.]