MEANINGFUL INTERPRETATION How To Connect Hearts And Minds To Places, Objects, And Other Resources

Journal Questions:

Interpretation is a journey, a never-ending quest for excellence reaching for wide horizons and challenging frontiers.

Interpretation is a guide, leading audiences from physical resources to their underlying meanings, from the tangible to the intangible, from sight to insight. By providing opportunities to connect to the meanings of the resource, interpretation provokes the public's participation in resource stewardship. It helps them to understand their relationships to, and impacts upon, those resources. And it helps them to care.

Interpretation is also a process — dynamic, flexible, and goal-driven, leading both the heart and mind to understanding, appreciation, and on to stewardship. Done well, resources flourish. Done poorly, resources perish.

You begin this journey. On it you follow many tried and beaten paths and pause at many crossroads. You travel in the hallowed footsteps of Freeman Tilden, Enos Mills, Rachel Carson, and Bill Lewis, building on turns and valleys they explored. Like them, be courageous in venturing onto uncharted highways. Like them, be open to new directions and destinations remembering that your footsteps shape the history of interpretation and its legacy of enrichment.

Interpretation has many twists and byways, facets and destinations. It winds through many disciplines. It's a science based on accurate facts and comprehensive information, methodical and exacting in its application of techniques and solid research. It's history, portraying both the famous and commonplace human drama, chronicling not just dates and numbers but emotions, ideas, and universal concepts. It's art, rooted in passion and love for places, species, and artifacts, ever moving the visitor's journey through memorable and meaningful experiences. Interpretation challenges the mind and engages the heart and the emotions.

A journey of such significance has mission and direction. Interpretation's mission is a strategic one based on conserving and preserving site resources, forging binding ties between audiences and their heritage, perpetuating strong partnerships, and ensuring that organizations achieve their missions. The destination is clear, but destiny will be determined by devotion to its accomplishment.

With this workbook, you have the opportunity to take your next steps on the interpretive journey. You stand on the brink of learning why, what, and how to do interpretation. You will benefit from guides embodied in knowledge of the resource, of the audience, of interpretive techniques. The future of interpretive quality depends on your success.

Knowledge of the resource requires constant discovery, the compass to new insights and layers of meanings about mountains, structures, rivers, and artifacts — the treasures interpreters care for so deeply. Knowledge of the resource is cultural history in context, not just in facts. It is natural history as ecosystem and environment, not just genus and species. Knowledge of the resource is adventure into new interpretations of people, time and place, and the ability to face controversy and challenge.

Knowledge of the audience realizes that there is no such thing as an average visitor. Visitors vary infinitely in their outlooks, values, and opinions. Visitors exist inside and outside site boundaries. They are not just the captive audience in a visitor center auditorium or the repeat visitors who love our places. They are also the cyberspace generations not yet at our doors or in the circle of our programs. They are old and young, national and international. They question and challenge old ideas and priorities, ask why the full dimensions of heritage are not yet explored. Interpreters must respect visitors as independent travelers on this journey of discovery, free to choose the meaning of the resource for themselves and free to determine what paths their stewardship will follow. And by respecting visitors, interpreters enrich their own journey.

Finally, YOU are part of this equation. Knowledge of yourself is essential. Interpreters hold the ultimate responsibility and accountability for their own development. Training is love, not lecture. Sensitivity, attitude, teamwork, and constant evaluation are the equipment by which interpreters hone and evaluate their readiness to progress, understanding there will be obstacles along the way. Interpretive techniques and basic competencies are not islands but rather steppingstones to your career, the foundation of your future. Build strong because you construct a lifetime framework. The directions are in place. The pace is yours.

The interpretive equation is ever shifting, but essentially stable. It's a delicate balance, not a perfect chemical formula. It's an intricate linkage where neglect on one part, tragically weakens the whole. There is no one interpretation, no single perfect way. But rather multiple techniques and relationships that link visitors with the real, the tangible resource and its immeasurable intangible and universal meanings — forging a lifetime bond.

You are responsible for interpretation's outcome. To effect the profession, you must first affect a memorable change within visitors, moving them to see a kaleidoscope of meanings with critical and wondering eyes. It's up to you to provide opportunities for emotional and intellectual connections to the meanings of the resource, understanding that the leap of caring and concern belongs to visitors.

Let the journey begin. As you take your next steps on the path of interpretive development, keep your eyes on the road but your heart in the stars. And may your journey never end!

Journal Questions:

What are you (or do you want to be) an interpreter?

"I love the story! The chase of the story, experiencing the story, knowing the story, and then having the story's meanings change unexpectedly. Interpretation enriched my life. I'm willing to exchange my life energies with this profession to give others the opportunities to find, experience, create and recreate their own stories."

"To share my belief that life on earth is sacred and what matters is the appreciation of, reflection of, and insight into creation. To allay mud slides or superficiality, mind-numbing television and media. To facilitate people's remembering their bare soul. To help them be affected by the world in the way they were in adolescence — to really feel the adventure of travel, the presence of another soul, the shared physical presence of an icon landscape — to assist with their immersion in the resource."

"I don't mingle or small talk well but really enjoy speaking when I know what I'm talking about."

"I believe that it is patriotic work — preserving the essence of America. Ideas, places, rivers, stories are all essential to our well being as a free and good people. It is good public service work."

"I like good conversation more than just about anything and an interpretive moment is like a good conversation."

I like who I am when I interpret. I like being knowledgeable and well balanced in expertise. I like being careful, sensitive, and observant of what my audience sees or does."

I want to instill that interior value about the environment. I want to touch visitors' lives with meaningful and relevant feelings about nature. And I want to somehow help the environment through education and awareness."

"I enjoy the intense thrill of creative effort. I also like to participate in a forum — like in Ancient Greece — an exchange."