21st Century Interpretation: Let The Interpretive Wheel Be Your Guide

Chris

In rhetoric classes, we often discuss stories by considering concepts like ethos and pathos. Ethos is Greek for character, and ethos relates to trust, credibility, and integrity. Great stories explore how people acted, why they acted that way, and the extent to which their actions align with shared values. Wrestling with the motives, means, and impact of a character’s actions helps us clarify our own values and chart future behaviors.

Pathos is Greek for experience, but the focus is really on how people suffer. People respond to suffering differently across time and space. The extent to which people feel empathy in response to human suffering is highly contextualized. Thus, telling a heart wrenching story requires fidelity to the values in play at the time when an event happened and an appeal to the values of the people you’re talking to.

Becky

Stories represent the nucleus of heritage site interpretation—everything revolves around the stories. As powerful as heritage site stories are, visitors also have powerful stories to tell. The power of interpretation is revealed when visitor stories augment and add dimensionality to heritage site stories. But for this dynamic to unfold, visitors have to be engaged in the storytelling process.

Theresa

Larry Beck says that interpretive experiences allow us to share stories, care for stories, and give stories away. This is a process where stories move into and through oneself. Stories can take up residence in our hearts and minds, nudging us to think and feel more deeply. Stories are a vehicle for provocation. They help us slough off the inertia that prevents us from acting; stories help us move beyond the status quo.

John

Storytelling is a human impulse, and stories are engines by which we conceive of the self. The courage to shift toward an ACE mindset requires that interpreters admit that place-based stories are never the only ones present. Visitors also have that storytelling impulse and it’s easily activated in place-based contexts. Allowing participants to share their own lived experiences—revealing connections in their lives that echo the stories of the place or rhyme with the stories of those around them—magnifies meaning.

Theresa

Because interpretive experiences immerse visitors in natural and cultural settings, these experiences can harness the power of place. Participants engage with the real thing, often grappling with questions of meaning and purpose. When heritage sites provide opportunities to ask and answer questions, participants can articulate connections between who they are and what the site represents. Because no one person or group has all the experiences and stories we need to function as a society, sharing stories at heritage sites “opens up rather than closes history,” Loyce Caruthers writes, enlivening rather than fossilizing our shared understanding.

John

There is a practical reason to invite sharing: people expect to be heard. Thanks to major shifts in our culture, communication has democratized. Where it once required infrastructure and riches to speak your voice in large public settings—owning a newspaper, a radio station, a television newsroom—now it only takes the tiny computer we all carry in our pockets. Our brains have been trained to not just consume the media that’s put in front of us but also to respond and join a larger conversation. Creating opportunities for self-expression, both big and small, is crucial to shifting from a didactic model of interpretation toward something richer and truly participatory.

Chris

To foster the mutual exchange of thoughts and perspectives, interpreters create a safe environment for participation. In Crucial Conversations, Joseph Grenny and his colleagues suggest that safety increases when participants express their intent, use “I” statements, engage in active listening, and ask open-ended questions. Several of my heritage leadership colleagues delved into the qualities that safe and brave spaces exemplify in their Legacy article on Engaging with Contested Heritage (Part 1). They also explored the importance of reflection, self-awareness, and an environment that supports the emotional labor required for interpreters to engage fully in audience-centered work in Engaging with Contested Heritage (Part 3).

Becky

With changing audience needs and expectations, there’s a shift away from the safety of interpreting for visitors to the riskier approach of interpreting with them. Interpreters facilitate, rather than lecture, providing opportunities for participants to share their lived experiences and engaging audience members as co-creators of meaning. While it may seem scary to share the spotlight with our audiences, using dialogic questions can guide respectful engagement. These questions are open-ended and invite audience contribution. They are intentionally crafted to elicit diverse meanings and build community within the group. Pairing dialogic questions with techniques that make participation safer and sharing easier can stimulate unexpected and exciting conversations. Good interpreters have always used these kinds of participatory methods, but in this context, the intention is to facilitate mutual learning rather than just getting an interpretive “message” across.

John

I often ponder questions like: What is the purpose of the spaces we love and care for? Are they worth preserving? Why not just pave them over or sell them to the highest bidder?

These questions are not just rhetorical exercises; they are being actively debated in our world today. And there is a potential future where the place you steward—the one you love—is demolished. This is why courage is so important. It takes courage to admit that other people’s meanings are as important as your own. Indeed, they might be more important than yours. If we fail to allow the public to find their own, unique purposes for our treasures, they will no longer be treasured.

Theresa

When we consider how humans relate to the environment in the 21st century, sticky problems abound and many of them hinge upon our land ethic. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic expands the definition of community to include not only humans, but all the other parts of the Earth as well: soils, waters, plants, and animals. Leopold thought that direct contact with the natural world and participation in a thinking community were essential to cultivating ethical relations that rise above self-interest. Perhaps the essence of a sticky problem is that it forces us to think about how to rise above the self-interest of some to ensure the wellbeing of the larger whole.

Chris

I think Leopold was onto something. Many heritage sites confront a threefold challenge: (1) facilitating immersive experiences in natural settings, (2) engaging visitors in a thinking community that reintegrates people and the land, and (3) enlarging the circle of human and nonhuman beings with whom we cultivate ethical relations. These efforts take on greater urgency as we face the threat of environmental tipping points—but overarching any potential negative trajectory is an opportunity to build a common life that includes the land.

Becky

In audience-centered practice, the stories, places, and people we interpret become the springboards for exploring broader meanings —meanings that transcend the boundaries of our sites, meanings that reflect current social relevance but also influence future relevance. To explore these issues is to bring a much greater purpose for preserving and protecting these places—they are critical to our current and future lives.

To that end, we need to be brave. We need to think beyond the traditional notion of a theme “statement” and design our interpretive experiences around theme questions that we explore with our audiences. There is no right answer or single conclusion—because sticky issues are sticky—which makes them awesome interpretive fodder for mutual learning and for growing our individual and collective perspectives. For example, to focus your interpretive experience on just the natural history of a redwood tree with a theme statement like “Redwood trees have unique adaptations for survival,” and not engage the audience with the threat to the trees’ existence from climate change with a theme question like “What adaptations do we need to make to ensure that both redwoods and humans survive?” is to do a disservice to both tree and audience.

John

The places we interpret should support the common good. We ask people to preserve and protect heritage sites with time, energy, and treasure. It stands to reason people should benefit from them. Frederick Douglass said in 1854 that, “we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” These places have the potential to help us wrestle with the massive, sticky problems facing our society. Heritage sites demand to be used in making tomorrow better than today.

Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to “the fierce urgency of now”—it’s this urgency that makes heritage sites relevant. They can bring us to new spaces physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; we use those moments of revelation to power change in our world. Heritage sites help us see familiar things in unfamiliar ways. Seeing sticky problems from different points of view gives each of us insight to make better decisions in our everyday lives. Giving visitors space to imagine tangible ways to change their world solidifies meaning making in concrete ways.