This session is made possible by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. To learn more, visit our Partners page.

Visitors carry their own perspectives about the past, shaped through narratives encountered in school, the home, and the media landscape. These (often manipulated) narratives frequently manifest in the form of negative emotional responses during visitor interactions with staff at historic sites and museums — particularly the docents and tour guides on the ‘front lines’ of visitor engagement work.

The workshop will explore techniques for facilitating potentially transformative visitor encounters with difficult knowledge related to historic resources. This cross-disciplinary approach combines narrative research methods, core historical interpretation principles, and skill-based analysis techniques of the media literacy field.

Participants will actively confront their own entrance narratives, and experiment with ‘conversational intervention’ methodologies for countering disinformation to adapt and explore applications of this approach to their own sites or other preservation contexts.

The program will deliver an evaluative model which uses narrative research methods and transformative learning theory to measure the impact of formal and informal interpretative interactions with visitors to historic sites and museums.