Interpretation: Making a Difference on Purpose

USA.

CHAPTER 1

Interpretation and Communication

Interpretation is simply an approach to communication. Like all forms of communication (for example, teaching, advertising, or political campaigning), we can define interpretation according to the places or contexts in which it usually occurs, the kinds of audiences it’s trying to reach, and the types of outcomes it aims to produce.¹ Interpretation traditionally involves communication with a pleasure-seeking audience in such places as museums, parks, historic sites, zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens as well as on cruise ships, in wineries, breweries, cheese and chocolate factories, and just about any place visitors go to have a good time and possibly learn something of interest. But in recent years, the practice of interpretation has been applied in many other ways that have little to do with tourism or leisure (e.g., municipal sustainability programs, marketing, advertising, and philanthropy campaigns).

In the interpretation field, we frequently refer to our audiences as visitors, but this isn’t always the case (as when the audience consists of households or businesses, someone surfing the web at home or reading a travel guide prior to visiting a place). Obviously, interpretation can reach many audiences right in their own communities, not just those that are visiting someplace. Still, it’s their openness to learning (an intellectual and sometimes emotional dimension of their experience) that sets audiences of interpretation apart from most others.

Although the outcomes we hope to produce through interpretation can vary widely, they usually involve at a minimum enhancing someone’s experiences. This happens, for example, when park visitors make personal connections to the places, features, or ideas someone interprets for them. The more they’re stimulated to think about things, the more connections they make, and the deeper their experience with those things is. Most interpreters I know consider this interpretation’s highest purpose.

Interpretation’s highest purpose—provoking thought. Photo courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, USA.

Another outcome of interest to a lot of interpreters is audiences having a positive attitude about the things that are interpreted for them (e.g., the place, feature, concept, and so on). Often interpretation strives to leave its audiences with an appreciation or positive evaluation of something. This something might be the organization or agency that manages the place (i.e., good public relations), but it also almost always includes appreciation of the things that were interpreted (the historic place or person, the time period or era, the valley or mountain, the river, the plant community, the geologic history, the wine, or the wildlife). People in the interpretation profession often refer to this sort of appreciative attitude as caring (Larsen, 2003), although similar terms such as mattering, liking, or even loving are sometimes used. Central to this outcome of interpretation is the goal of facilitating some sort of emotional or affective response within the visitor.

A third but less common outcome of interpretation is behavioral. Among the visitors to interpretive settings, we sometimes encounter a special subset of people whose behavior is somehow at odds with management or protection objectives. Sometimes a relatively few visitors do things that cause damage to protected resources or fragile settings, and other times they may unknowingly put themselves in danger. When their actions are due mainly to naïveté, misinformation, or misconception, we often use interpretation in the form of persuasive communication to promote proper or preferred behavior.

These three outcomes of interpretation (enhancing experiences, facilitating appreciation, and influencing behavior) are closely related, and together they define the kinds of differences interpretation is capable of making. As we’ll see in later chapters, there’s a sequence to them that is underpinned by quite a lot of research on how communication affects human beings. The first person to highlight the steps in this sequence was Freeman Tilden (1957: 38) whose phrase through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection has become nothing short of a mantra for practicing interpretation professionals around the world.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere (Ham, 2009a), only in the half century following Tilden’s bold claim has the research evidence behind his assertion actually materialized (an indication, perhaps, that he was well ahead of his time). Yet studies today do indeed show that when people are able to make their own connections (e.g., enhancing visitors’ experiences), they’re inclined to appreciate one way or another what was interpreted (positive attitudes), and when they have an appreciative attitude about something, they’re likely—when given the opportunity—to act toward it in a respectful or protective way (appropriate behavior). As the US National Park Service (2012) aptly put it: "People will only care for what they first care about."

Three Important Terms

So who actually does interpretation? In this book, I’ll call them interpreters. I use interpreter to refer to anyone who does any kind of interpretive work through any communication medium (face-to-face or nonpersonal). Among these are speakers, writers, designers, and artists; employees of or volunteers for parks, zoos, museums, historic sites, tour operators, cruise ship companies, science centers, gardens, forests, aquariums, wineries, breweries, theme parks, and manufacturing plants; as well as guides, expedition leaders, docents, storytellers, composers, dramatists, directors, actors, and performers of all kinds. Whew, that’s quite a list. And, if nothing else, it reflects the sheer diversity of the interpretation profession across the world.

I’ll use the term interpretive encounter to refer to any act of interpretation—both personal (face-to-face) and nonpersonal (self-guided)—in order to avoid continually repeating these two possibilities. Interpretive encounters happen at the point of communication. They can involve a park interpreter talking or interacting with one or more visitors; they can occur while a person surfs the web at home; they take place when a motorist stops to read a wayside exhibit, when a museum visitor ponders a display, or through virtually any communication medium aimed at achieving one of the three outcomes earlier described. How interpretive encounters can be orchestrated to produce these outcomes is the topic of this book.

Finally, I’ll use the term interpretive product to mean any finished interpretive program or device. A museum theatrical performance is an interpretive product; a community sustainability education event is an interpretive product; a park ranger’s evening program is an interpretive product; a tour through a wildlife park is an interpretive product; and displays, smartphone apps, wayside exhibits, brochures, information kiosks, and websites are all interpretive products, too. Interpretive encounters take place whenever the product is being delivered to an actual audience.

Interpretation and Communication |

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Examples of face-to-face interpretive products: (a) museum docent presentation, Hands On Childrens Museum (Olympia), USA. Photo by Barbara Ham; (b) interpretive theater. Courtesy of Sovereign Hill Museums Association, Australia; (c) storytelling performance. Courtesy of Susan Strauss Storyteller, USA; (d) visitor information desk encounter, Haleakala National Park, USA. Photo by Barbara Ham; (e) guided nature walk. Courtesy of Arkansas State Parks, USA.

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Examples of nonpersonal interpretive products: (a) interpretive brochures. Photo by Barbara Ham; (b) interpretive website. Photo by Barbara Ham; (c) interpretive wayside exhibit, Haleakala National Park, USA. Photo by Barbara Ham; (d) science center exhibit. Courtesy of California Academy of Sciences, USA; (e) interpretive smartphone app. Photo by Barbara Ham.

A Working Definition of Interpretation

I said at the beginning of this chapter that interpretation is an approach to communication. I’ll outline in more detail what this approach entails later in this chapter, but for now the term interpretation is probably new to some readers and needs a working definition. The first author to define interpretation formally was Freeman Tilden (1957: 8) in his classic, Interpreting Our Heritage. Tilden wasn’t a scientist, a naturalist, a historian, or a technician of any kind. Rather, he was a journalist, playwright, and philosopher. He was not academically grounded in history, biology, or the physical sciences—frequent subjects of interpretive programs—but he was an unusually sensitive person with a profound intuitive understanding of how humans communicate best. This understanding guided his view of interpretation, which he defined as

an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.

As his definition suggests, Tilden saw interpretation as an approach to communicating in which the primary aim is the construction of meanings and the revelation of relationships in the visitor’s mind rather than the mastering of isolated facts and figures. Although any interpreter will use factual information to illustrate points and clarify meanings, according to Tilden, it’s the points and meanings that interpreters should care about most—not the facts.

It sometimes escapes the casual reader of Interpreting Our Heritage that Tilden’s definition was not saying that it’s the interpreter who does the revealing of meanings and relationships. On the contrary, he was making the case that the interpreter’s role is one of facilitating or stimulating visitors to make these connections for themselves. In his view, the meanings and relationships are self-revealed in visitors’ minds as a result of the thinking that good interpretation can provoke them to do—rather than somehow being put there by the fact-bearing interpreter. Tilden saw in the 1950s what it took nearly three decades of research to demonstrate later: that the only meanings a visitor can attach to a place, thing, or concept are those that he or she makes in his or her own mind. The interpreter’s job, as he saw it, is to orchestrate and catalyze the thinking—what he called provocation. We’ll give special attention to this idea in Chapter 3 (The Endgame of Interpretation) and will return to it repeatedly throughout the book.

In the fifty years following the publication of Interpreting Our Heritage, a number of other definitions of interpretation have made Tilden’s meaning-making view of things even more explicit. I think the best of these is the one advanced by the National Association for Interpretation (NAI):²

Interpretation is a mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and meanings inherent in the resource.

Although philosophers and wordsmiths might debate this or that word choice, what’s significant about NAI’s definition is that it clearly distinguishes interpretation from other forms of communication. Most important is its emphasis on connection making and the audience, since these two elements are at the heart of the difference interpretation can make, at least if it’s done well. The definition is consistent with dozens of studies that have demonstrated that the more an audience is provoked to do its own thinking and make its own connections, the stronger and more enduring their attitudes about related things will be as a result (see Ham, 2009a and 2007 for reviews of some of this research). So, as NAI’s definition says, connection making is the single most important outcome of interpretation. In addition, NAI has taken the necessary step of linking the role of interpretation to the missions of the organizations that provide interpretive services. This makes interpretation core business for these organizations and not simply an add-on customer entertainment function as it has sometimes erroneously been seen.

Therefore, taking the heart of NAI’s definition and applying it explicitly to Tilden’s focus on provocation, I’ve adopted the following working definition of interpretation for this book:

Interpretation is a mission-based approach to communication aimed at provoking in audiences the discovery of personal meaning and the forging of personal connections with things, places, people, and concepts.

For the purposes of the chapters that lie ahead, this definition captures what I believe makes interpretation both different from other forms of information transfer and deserving of special treatment in a book such as this one. First, it’s a way of communicating—an approach—that is necessary given the settings in which interpretation is normally practiced and the mindset of the pleasure-seeking audiences that are reachable there. Second, it follows NAI’s lead in seeing interpretation as purposeful and relevant within an organization’s core mission. Third, it’s consistent with Tilden’s and NAI’s notion that the hallmark of successful interpretation lies in the thoughts, meanings, and connections made in the audience’s minds. And finally, it makes clear that the meanings and connections we’re most interested in are those that pertain to the things interpreters actually show and explain to their audiences.

Interpretation versus Formal Instruction

You’ll notice that all three of these definitions (Tilden’s, NAI’s, and mine) clearly set interpretation apart from traditional instruction. In the classroom, the teacher’s goal sometimes is to communicate facts alone, a process necessary in the long-term education of students.³ In interpretation, however, the facts are a means to an end, rather than the end itself. Interpreters carefully select and present only those facts that help the audience relate to and appreciate what they’re trying to show or explain. In instruction, presenting facts may sometimes be the teacher’s ultimate objective; in interpretation, it virtually never is. Carefully selected facts can be supportive, illustrative, and illuminating—but they’re rarely ends in themselves. In interpretation, as we’ll see shortly, our bigger goal is to communicate a message—a message that answers the question so what? or big deal? with regard to the factual information we’ve chosen to present. In this respect, there’s always a moral to an interpreter’s story. We’ll return to this idea in much more detail in Chapters 2 and 6.

One of the difficulties some interpreters have is understanding that their job is not to teach their audiences in the same sense they were taught in school. Many interpreters enter their jobs without formal training or prior experience, and they’re understandably unsure just how they should approach their role as communicators. The only role models many interpreters have are their former teachers. There is nothing inherently wrong with this because there are some very good teachers, but as we shall see, communication methods appropriate in the classroom may not always be acceptable to audiences outside of the formal education system.

Some of You Might Remember This Guy

Mr. Jones (Figure 1-1) made his public debut in 1992 when I chose him as a figurehead for explaining what I called the interpretive approach to communication. Some of you might recall that he’s a secondary school science teacher during the school year and works as a park interpreter every summer. Mr. Jones is fascinated with rocks and minerals and tends to emphasize them in his science classes as well as in his talks at the park.

Notice Mr. Jones’s classroom teaching methods. He tells his students to read from a geology book, so they’ll learn terms he feels they should know in order to identify several kinds of rocks. Among these terms are cleavage, silicates, tetrahedral bonding, volcanism, metamorphosis, and sedimentation. Whether or not you know much about rocks, you might agree that these are important terms for Mr. Jones to teach his students. He also gives lectures using his extensive notes, and he writes and draws a lot on a whiteboard. Meanwhile, the students know it’s their role to copy the material from the whiteboard and take notes on everything Mr. Jones says during his lectures. There will be an exam soon, and they’ll be expected to know everything they’ve read and everything Mr. Jones has said. In other words, the students will have to demonstrate to Mr. Jones that they remember the facts he taught them about rocks. But they don’t mind; although Mr. Jones demands a lot of work from them, he’s a nice man, he tells a lot of jokes in class, and he gives fair exams. Most students enjoy his