Legacy Magazine

By Robert J. Hanna

The reconstructed Römerkastell Saalburg, a historic fort at the frontier of the ancient Roman Empire, offers a wealth of interesting and educational programs for school groups and pre-booked groups.

It was exactly the kind of interpretive moment Freeman Tilden was talking about. I was in the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, face-to-face with a movable-type printing press for the first time. A friendly interpreter there showed me how to arrange type into a brass holder, clamp it together, ink it, and roll it through the press onto paper. Suddenly movable type was no longer some mysterious, obsolete technology to me. It became the rumbling of clunky gears and rollers behind the pull lever, an inky mess on my fingers, a practice of creation. Type became not just shapes and symbols, but fistfuls of glistening black metal cubes, crunching like gravel in my hand, the tiny soldiers of a thousand bloody and bloodless revolutions.

I didn’t learn much that day—not if learning means picking up facts and names. Instead I learned to love something. And passing on such love is, after all, our first goal as interpreters. That interpretive experience opened up what will be a lifetime of learning to me. Now I can’t see a book bound in old-fashioned folios without studying it in detail. I later decided to take a trip to Mainz to see the Gutenberg Museum and wonder at Gutenberg’s strange new books. And goodness only knows how many of my friends had to listen to stories about my exciting new experiences with printing presses—and perhaps caught some of my excitement as well.

That’s the power of interpretation—to open up new experiences, not simply to teach, but to create learners, to awaken enthusiasm for new knowledge. For better or for worse, though, this project commits us to a never-ending search for new ideas. To interpret effectively, we need to reach our audiences where they are, offering them experiences that are fresh and surprising. An exhibit or tour that could have captured visitors’ imaginations years ago can easily be stale today.

An eye-catching display case in the Historisches-Museum Frankfurt.

This seems unpleasant, of course, but it is also what makes our work a matter requiring creativity—and thus what makes it fun. We are continuously looking at our sites, our parks, our tours, our interpretive centers, and so forth and asking ourselves how we can make them even more effective and interesting for our visitors. But no new ideas come without inspiration. Even the greatest thinkers didn’t just think up their new ideas all at once. They built upon and adapted earlier ones. That’s one of the reasons the National Association for Interpretation is so important to us—it provides an opportunity for us to exchange and build upon our ideas, both allowing us to improve our interpretation in everyday practice and to improve the art of interpretation as a whole.

And where better to look for new and fresh ideas than in other countries? Studying as an American in Germany for the last couple of years has shown me that even in the 21st century, many ideas still rarely cross national borders. People in every country have a habit of communicating with those who share the same culture and language. Reaching out across borders requires deliberate effort, but the results are rewarding.

The National Association for Interpretation has indeed been making strides towards increasing our international activities. The main efforts so far are the annual international conference, the ecotour program, the international volunteer program, and international partnerships with interpretive organizations in China and Korea.

However, NAI, while being enthusiastic about the benefits these activities will bring both to the association and to our contacts abroad, is also rather apologetic for them, as one can read on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page of the association website. There it is emphasized that the association avoids investing any money in our international activities. I’d like to contribute to a conversation about becoming more involved internationally and argue that everyone stands to benefit from such an undertaking.

Of course, if we look specifically for American-style heritage interpreters at nature reserves and historic sites abroad, we’ll find comparatively few. The idea of heritage interpretation today is mostly limited to the English-speaking world, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. But if we consider anyone connecting resources and visitors in meaningful, educational, and enriching ways to be interpreting, then there are thousands of people the world over creatively seeking new and better ways to do just that. There’s a rich variety of ideas out there, and countless of them result in visitor experiences that are not only interesting and effective, but also unintentionally interpretive in the best sense of the world—like the printing press I encountered in Frankfurt.

The Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt effectively uses masses of telephones, mailboxes, radios, and so forth to command visitors’ attention and invite them to study individual objects that interest them in detail.

I can offer Germany as just one example of a country where we might learn new ideas. The main forces for interpretation in Germany are museums, city tours, tour groups, and interpretive signage. Interpretation in the classic American sense at natural and historic sites is comparatively minimal but growing. However, if we look to museums, we’ll find a thriving wealth of new ideas—fundamentally interpretive ideas that bring natural or cultural resources and visitors together. Just a few decades ago, museums in Germany were assumed to be research institutions for scholars and experts. They weren’t really for the general public, and certainly not for kids. But you’d hardly know it now. Since then German museums have been striving with a vengeance to offer creative, attention-getting exhibits for audiences of all kinds.

One standout difference at these interpretive locations is an emphasis on local people. We who interpret in the United States often try so hard to attract tourists that we neglect people in the local area. Many German museums, on the other hand, see no reason why local enthusiasts shouldn’t visit their favorite museum as often as their favorite restaurant. There just has to be a reason to keep them coming back. Thus many German museums offer both special events and weekly classes to tempt in local fans on a regular basis. For example, a museum that interprets another culture might offer a weekly cooking class lasting several months to introduce participants to that culture’s traditional dishes. This slightly different emphasis makes sense, because local people are those we need most to thrive. One of the foremost buzzwords in German museum development today is Zielgruppen, or target groups. Such groups might be young children, teenagers, elders, or disabled people. Some museums, for example, have created tours specifically for blind visitors. To be effective, of course, these tours require an interpreter with considerable knowledge of how people with various kinds of vision impairments perceive and understand their surroundings, but they create an incredibly rewarding experience for visitors who might otherwise feel cut off from the world of interpretive sites. Dr. Sojna Schierle, director of pedagogy for the Linden Museum of Ethnology in Stuttgart, has described to me her new idea of recognizing families as a target group. She wanted to offer interactive activities that would bring parents and their children together. In one event, each family formed a team and competed against the other families to complete projects and answer questions about the exhibit. Since the resource was a collection of artifacts about Japanese Noh theater, the final project was for each family to organize a Noh-inspired puppet show.

Many of the ideas being developed are hidden behind the scenes. One of the main topics of discussion among German museum interpreters today is ethics. How does one balance bringing the resource to the public with preserving it? What should museums do with resources that came to their collections through questionable means, such as artifacts taken from colonies in earlier centuries? Is it respectful to interpret the religions of other cultures, and if so, how?

Although this Melanesian men’s house is an antique original, visitors to the Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem in Berlin are welcomed to climb inside.

Naturally, new ideas gleaned from abroad may need to be translated before we use them at home. What works well in one country might need adjustments before it works in another. For example, most interpreters in the United States cannot invest quite as many resources into seeking local visitation as German sites do, where the denser population makes for a larger pool of potentially interested locals.

Of course, people abroad would also like to learn our ideas. The ideas that NAI, the National Park Service, and each of us have been developing are valuable concepts that many interpreters in other countries would be very interested to hear about. I once spoke with a German professor who specializes in museum pedagogy about my interest in studying the subject. She encouraged me not to go into it, because all I’d find is that museums are constantly forced to compromise between educating and entertaining. Therefore I told her a little about heritage interpretation—neither exactly entertaining nor educating, but awakening visitors to a newfound interest in and enthusiasm about the resource. She was quite excited about the idea.

Sites the world over stand to benefit from the wisdom the NAI has been gathering and developing over the years, while NAI similarly stands to reap incredible new ideas from other countries. Think of a café mocha—one of the most delicious ideas in history. It took the contributions of people from Ethiopia, Yemen, the Mayan Empire, and Italy to produce it. I hope the future of heritage interpretation will be similar, with people from all over the world contributing and combining ideas into rich new interpretive experiences we can’t even imagine now.

Robert Hanna is a masters student in history at Philipps-Universität Marburg in Marburg, Germany, and a seasonal interpreter at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park near Bismarck, North Dakota.