FEATURE
Nurturing Curiosity in Divided Times
A curious nuthatch, a species known for their ability to climb down tree trunks head-first due to a longer rear talon, perches upside down on a wood fence. Photo courtesy of the editors.
How can interpreters help people stay curious in a time of deep division? What responsibility do heritage professionals have when presenting complex stories to audiences with very different perspectives? And how do our own experiences shape the way we approach difficult conversations? Over two lively conversations in Spring 2026, interpretive trainers Emily Jacobs, Kristin Robinson, and Monique Thompson gathered to discuss these questions (and more!). Drawing on their work in interpretation, facilitation, and depolarization, they reflect on how skills central to interpretation—listening, curiosity, empathy, and storytelling—can help people engage across differences while honoring complexity. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and space.
Introductions
Emily Jacobs:
Hi all, I am delighted to be here with the two of you, to talk about who we are and what brought us to this deliberation and depolarization work. Let’s start with introductions.
I’m Emily Jacobs with Story Quilters Consulting. I’ve been involved with NAI for decades, and for me, the defining moment around this issue in our field was the 2016 presidential election. The NAI National Conference was taking place during that election, and the next day the whole conference felt almost like a funeral. As a staff member, I really struggled. I kept asking myself, “How do we hold space for people right now? What do they need?” So I worked with Brayden Paynter and John Rudy to offer a facilitated dialogue for our members.
That moment made me realize I didn’t fully understand how we had gotten to that point, and that I needed to, because there was a whole side of America I didn’t really know. I believe in fair elections. I believe Donald Trump was elected fairly. So I found myself asking: what can I do to better understand people’s motivations and choices? In our work, I’m often living inside a blue bubble, and I knew I needed to do more to understand another point of view.
It took me a while to find people who were willing to really talk, but in 2020 I got involved with a national organization called Braver Angels, where I now work part time. Braver Angels gave me the chance to build new skills and form real, authentic relationships with people across the political divide.
That interest, along with the current moment, is actually what inspired me to start my own company. I love interpretation and I love interpreters, but I’m also deeply interested in helping our field do more. My business explores the synergy between interpretation, mediation, and facilitation, especially around depolarization and the role it can play in our work. I still love building a strong interpretive plan or coaching a program, but for me the real magic and curiosity live in that synergy.
Kristin Robinson:
My name is Kristin Robinson, and I run The Impact Story (formerly Stage Naked), an interpretive training company specializing in live interpretation. My interpretive programs focus on relatability, storytelling, and complexity: the same skills that drive my depolarization work.
One of my most popular programs currently is Touchy Subjects. It's built for interpreters who want their programs to explore sensitive material, especially content that's gotten tangled up in our current polarized environment.
The core of it goes back to my years leading tours in France. I was the person at the front of the bus with 40 people with me for two weeks, and like any interpretive work, you have no control over who shows up. Half my guests were thrilled to be there. The other half ranged from ambivalent to bitter. My job was to get both groups engaged in the same experience so I used my interpretive skills to figure out how to do that.
Then 2016 happened, and 2020. I watched friends and family move either farther left or farther right, and suddenly I was navigating the same problem in my personal life. I refused to lose people I loved over politics. So I got to work figuring out how to actually talk to them.
The more I learned about depolarization, the more I thought “Oh gosh, this overlaps my interpretive skill set!” That overlap is what led to the work I do today.
Monique Thompson:
I came to this work in interpretation probably later than both of you. In 2017, I lost my 20-year old daughter in a car accident. That moment changed everything. It stripped away what felt comfortable and familiar and forced me to ask a different question—not how to rebuild what I had, but how to imagine something new. That loss clarified what mattered most to me: connection.
I think that’s where our work lives. Not in rebuilding what was, but in creating new ways of being with ourselves and with each other. I went on to pursue a graduate degree in Conservation Leadership, where I became involved with the Center for Public Deliberation. I began facilitating dialogue around complex issues—healthcare, housing, and more recently, conversations connected to America250. I found myself drawn to spaces where people could come together across differences, not to agree, but to better understand one another.
At the same time, I was entering the worlds of interpretation and restorative justice. All of this work grew out of that earlier loss. They became ways of exploring how we create meaning, how we stay in relationship, and how we build bridges.
That work eventually took shape through my role as an interpretive consultant and the founding of Raindrop Naturalist. Through this work, I partner with organizations, interpreters, and educators to design experiences that foster curiosity, connection, and reflection—especially in spaces where people may hold different perspectives or where the story itself invites tension, complexity, or deeper engagement.
I often think about the Earthrise photograph… It shifted perspective from individual experience to something shared and collective. That image has stayed with me. It represents the possibility of seeing ourselves as connected, even when we experience the world differently. That’s the work I’m drawn to now.
The laughter and joy in this photo says it all in this photo of a Braver Angels Alliance, gathering across the divide to share a meal. Photo by Emily Jacobs.
How do you define depolarization?
Monique: When we think about depolarization, it's moving from I to we. Not erasing difference—but expanding how we see the problem. Instead of asking, "What do I think?" we begin asking, "What are we navigating together?" It moves us beyond stereotypes and quick judgments, and toward seeing the world through someone else’s lens—not to agree, but to understand. Depolarization is less about thinking alike and more about navigating the relationship when we don’t.
Kristin: The different groups, very frequently, are looking at different areas of the same puzzle. One person sees blue sky, another sees forest, another sees trout in a stream. Each speaks as if that is the whole. The reality is, no one has the entire puzzle yet. And so, to me, depolarization is a way of getting more and more of those puzzle pieces into the mix. It’s a strategy for creating conversations where everyone feels welcome and seen, including people who fundamentally disagree with each other. Our job can be to keep everyone in the conversation.
Emily: To me, depolarization is about breaking down perceived barriers and ideas about the “other.” It's about finding ways to break down boundaries, so we can see the whole person and find commonality amongst us; depolarization is about recognizing and accepting the complexity in each other (and ourselves). It’s also about being curious and leaning into where we don’t agree, to seek to understand the “why” behind someone’s opinions and values.
Kristin: We should note, not all interpretation has to be depolarizing. And when we want to depolarize, we can help people investigate complexity and leave those different elements in tension. Or our goal might be a very narrowly defined outcome we aim for by design, by mission. Those are not the same kinds of programs, and both can contribute to depolarization.
Emily: There's also often fear where people are worried that somehow, by being curious about the other side, they are no longer being true to theirs. But I have found in my conversations across the divide, that I become more grounded and more distilled in my opinion. Few things are red or blue (conservative or liberal), and I believe we all really need to discover and accept “the purple people-eater” in each of us.
Monique: It's being willing to acknowledge that something is missing. We're not seeing the whole picture when we only see ourselves, and we have to remember that we’re all still neighbors.
Interpretive depolarization is a means to connect across divides. Photo courtesy of John Hain on Pixabay.
What role does interpretation play in depolarization work, and what makes it a methodology to open a doorway rather than close one?
Monique: I feel like interpretation opens a doorway because it begins with curiosity not conclusions. This methodology creates conditions where we can disagree, but not divide. I’ve experienced this personally. I used to live in a place where most people thought like I did. Now I live in a neighborhood where I’m often in the minority…in terms of perspective. This has allowed me to see and hear people as neighbors, and not as “others.”
I think about how I'm responding inside, and whether that shows up externally as well, and how I can maintain my curiosity in a conversation where I am internally disagreeing. I also think about our interpretive experiences as a lab for people to practice staying curious and ask questions about subjects that are complex and difficult, because there will be other opinions in the room, and that's important to learn.
Emily:
Yes, Monique. As I've learned and leaned more into this work, it's really given me an opportunity to practice, just like you said, the difference between listening for understanding, as opposed to listening to respond. If you asked, my husband would probably tell you I'm a terrible person to fight with because I listen for “gotchas” and then throw them back when we’re arguing. But that's not what this is. This is listening to understand. To ask: What is your story? What are your experiences?
Monique:
What about just listening? Because sometimes when I tell myself, ‘I’m listening for understanding,” I’m still trying to get somewhere. But when I’m just listening—that’s when curiosity shows up.
Kristin: I also think it helps to separate somebody's ideas and stance from who they are at their core. That's a crucial skill in this work: empathizing with the human and what they've lived through, even when we’re going to completely disagree with their ideas. Which is not always easy, especially when something touches us personally.
I was at a conference once, sitting at lunch next to a gentleman of color and a white gentleman who were talking. I overheard the white gentleman say that people of color would never be the moral equivalent of white people, and women would never be the intellectual equivalent of men. On the inside, I went—ROAR.
But the gentleman next to me responded completely differently. He just kept asking open, curious questions, no gotchas, not taking any of it personally. I tracked him down afterward and asked how he did it. His father had been murdered in a hate crime. The journey toward forgiveness led him to connect with—and eventually befriend—the founder of the white supremacist group responsible, a man who had since left the movement and was actively working against it. Through that relationship he taught himself to separate the person from their words and behavior.
So there he was, in that charged moment at lunch, genuinely curious about the person across from him. And there I was, just trying to get my inner outrage under control. He'd already done the hard work learning not to take other people's perspectives personally, even in the most emotionally loaded situations.
That's what empathy actually demands sometimes: extending dignity to someone when you really don't want to.
Monique:
It takes practice.
Sometimes, empathy demands us to extend dignity to someone when you really don't want to, as in this image from a Braver Angels slide deck. Image courtesy of Braver Angels.
What role does interpretation play in helping us notice and question our assumptions?
Emily:
Thinking about the role that interpretation plays, I wonder if we are “othering” even in our work? We think, “Ah, you are somebody who's come to my site because you also care about history. Or because you also want to preserve the oceans.” But when we instead think about that visitor's motivation, it's a wonderful opportunity for us to remember that, actually, that may not be why somebody's come to your site. They've come because their dad was in town, or because they're on a school field trip. The visitor might surprise us.
Though we might be drawing people together who all care about the ocean, they might actually have different political leanings. But we're probably assuming they lean the way that we do and have the same motivations and values as us.
So it got me wondering, what are the assumptions I'm making about my audience? Just because they care about the same thing that our site is about, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have the same political leaning and our work might actually be helping to bridge the divide as we bring people together who care about the same topics we are interpreting, but might be ideologically different.
Monique:
Assumptions don’t ask questions.
Kristin:
Getting beyond ideologies, then we think about the humans who hold those ideologies, who have lived experiences. And then we get below that to the values. And the values being a place where we do find commonalities, even if we start diverging.
Monique:
And sometimes those values are the same—we’ve just labeled them differently.
The roots of polarization and "Touchy Subjects" lie below the surface—in the lived experience of people. Government Advocates learn interpretive strategies for communicating across divides. Photo by Women in Government Relations.
What kinds of training do interpreters need now if their role increasingly includes convening, not just presenting?
Kristin:
I’d start with the part of active listening where you stop to verify you understand and aren’t making assumptions about what you have heard before you move on. I remember listening to a conversation being facilitated by Bill Doherty, of Braver Angels. He worked with two cousins who had different philosophical views. First they played out a conversation on a political topic, and you heard them come at one another with their own perspectives and rebut, and refute, and gotcha. Then, Bill made them do it where before they could state their own rebuttal, or their own idea, they first had to say back, check for understanding. “Did I hear you correctly? Is this what you said? Is my assumption right?”
And it kept the temperature down. But both participants said it was exhausting to do it this way. So, when you practice this skill in lower-stakes environments, you're building your capacity to be able to do this.
Implicit bias training is helpful. The Decision Lab’s website has a whole section on various implicit biases that are running in our heads. They don't make us good or bad. But you can educate yourself about some of the processes that create stumbling blocks. And Mónica Guzmán's book I Never Thought of It That Way is essential.
Emily:
I think it's worth sharing a couple of resources, things like the newsletter “All Sides” that you can sign up for, so you see how each side is covering certain topics in the news. For example, with the war in Iran: it will cover what the left is saying, and what the right is saying. There's also another publication called “Tangle” that you can sign up for.
Simply put, Mónica's book title is really the crux of it. The times in which I have been open to a different opinion, or at least been able to say, “I completely disagree with you. But I never thought of it that way” have been transforming.
For example, a few years ago I was interviewed by StoryCorps for “One Small Step,” and it was fascinating. Before the interview began, they had us write down our thoughts to a series of questions for our conversation. The first set of questions had to do with our childhood. Later in the document were questions such as “What is the issue that is most important to you today?”
As the interview began, they told us we had to start with the questions at the top. From there, we could explore other topics as we felt moved. So we began. Within a few minutes we were talking and laughing and connecting about our similar experiences, and even though he lives on a completely different coast, he's 25 years older than I am, he's conservative, and he's of a different religious upbringing than me, we find so much from our backgrounds that connect. Then when he read my answer to, “What is the issue that is most important to you today,” (and I had said, “climate change.”) He literally said, “Well, let me tell you about why you're wrong about that!” My response was to laugh, rather than being defensive or offended, because we had spent 25 minutes getting to know each other first and so I knew he was a good man.
Monique:
I love the LAPP acronym: Listen, Acknowledge, Pivot, and Perspective. I think the pivot point is very important. It’s a moment where you invite the other person in: “Would you like to hear my perspective,” or, “Would you like to hear my thoughts on it?” It's very invitational. Then, you can save that perspective for people who want to hear it—who are open to conversation and willing to build a bridge. And when that answer is yes, when that invitation is accepted, then we can share our perspective, because you've given them the opportunity to say yes or no to that, and I think that's important.
When someone says no, I respond with, “Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it,” and then choose whether to continue or let the conversation rest. That choice helps me maintain my capacity and keep my peace.
Kristin:
I think of this approach very often. If somebody brings up something, we can put it in the parking lot, or we can say, “I'm happy to continue that conversation with you if we have a few minutes at the end.” Then, if we have that one-on-one opportunity, giving somebody that agency is so helpful.
Monique:
This kind of learning comes with practice, especially about managing group dynamics and really considering the needs of the group, both spoken and unspoken. I've heard interpreters recommend verbal judo—to be deft in your conversation and in adapting to what's happening in front of you. Improv is also a really good way to do that as well.
The cover of I Never Thought of it That Way by Mónica Guzmán. Photo courtesy of BenBella Books.
Learning about the lives and stories of others is at the heart of depolarization. Students in a workshop explore finding the story at the heart of information. Photo by Connecticut League of Museums.
What’s the last thing we’d recommend? What does dreaming forward look like?
Emily:
A lot of the conversation we've had might make someone think that we're advocating for a different type of interpretation. That we're saying you need to do dialogic-style interpretation, or you need to be having these one-on-one conversations. Those are important, but I don't think that that's necessarily what we're saying. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the traditional interpretive experience that we've often been training for, or we've been trained to do.
I love to give the type of interpretive experience where we're exploring the night sky, or we're talking about the geology of a place. There will also be places where there are difficult topics or difficult things that the conversation brings forward. So, if this happens, we're trying to offer some tools and thoughts for interpreters who may choose to go there with their visitors or guests.
Monique:
Increasingly in my interpretive courses, I'm finding people, even in the traditional interpretive experiences, being challenged in one way or another by the questions that people ask, or the viewpoints that people are sharing. So, “yes, and.”
Yes, there is still deep value in traditional interpretive experiences. And… we also have an opportunity to expand how we hold those moments when complexity shows up.
Emily:
So, if heritage organizations want to move beyond presenting complex histories towards helping communities practice civic trust, what is the one concrete shift that you'd recommend?
Monique:
I would recommend a shift toward participatory interpretation that helps people build skills, not just receive information. Instead of only asking, “What should visitors learn?” we also ask, “What can visitors practice while they’re here?”
That can happen within the experiences we’re already designing. By asking open-ended questions and making space for multiple perspectives, we invite people to reflect, listen, and consider the ideas of others. We might ask: What are you noticing? What feels important here? What are you hearing from others?
These kinds of questions create opportunities for visitors to share their voices and engage with one another. In those moments, we’re not just interpreting—we’re building capacity. Visitors practice skills like listening and engaging across difference. And we, as interpreters, learn how to stay present with what’s emerging, connect with the group, and adapt to different dynamics.
Ultimately, this is about creating conditions where people can move from “I” to “we” together.
Kristin:
I don't think we've hit our stride yet presenting complex subjects in their complexity. I think we have been doing some really important work involving spotlighting stories that have been overlooked, marginalized, erased, underrepresented, etc. Spotlighting allows us to really drill into one thing well, richly, deeply.
But it does not inherently obligate us to engage with complexity in an interrelational kind of way. If we are running programs that right now have been leaning heavily into some kind of spotlighting, maybe the next shift is intersectionality. Where can we move from spotlighting one thing to looking at intersections between stories we think we know well and stories that we are just now learning?
We find one of those points of overlap or tension, and we start diving into that. That might allow us to build on the work of bringing in perspectives and stories and histories that have not been there. We can start to broaden that conversation in ways that stretch us and challenge us interpreters learning to do this work, and the audiences that we bring along for the ride.
Emily:
Absolutely. Recently I’ve been reading about how much public trust there is in our work. And that trust comes with responsibility. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are institutions. We are places for Americans to practice their civic muscles and build those skills.
So, some of this is about figuring out: is this work within your program, within the mission of your organization? Is it within you as an individual? Can we create opportunities for curiosity to then build those skills, whether it's holding that tension, whether it's thinking about our own individual bias, whether it's thinking about the power of “and?”
I’d acknowledge that interpreters are probably already doing this work, and I’d encourage interpreters to explore, what would it look like to do it intentionally?
Kristin:
I love that.
Emily:
And I have loved this. Thanks to both of you again!
What skills & abilities do Interpreters need? A question posed by Monique Thompson, with sticky note answers by participants, during a 2026 Certified Interpretive Guide class. Photo by Monique Thompson.
For More Information
Center for Public Deliberation: https://cpd.colostate.edu
Braver Angels: www.braverangels.org
National Issues Forum: https://nifi.org/
Ground News: https://ground.news/
Allsides: https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Allsides Red-Blue Translator: https://www.allsides.com/translator
Ad Fontes: https://adfontesmedia.com/
Tangle News: https://www.readtangle.com/
The Decision Lab Implicit Bias Index: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases-index
