I recently had a very interesting chat with a colleague who is working on educational programmes. They covered a whole range of topics that may be of interest to teachers and so encourage them to bring pupils on site. I admired their ideas for a broad variety of possible projects, and yet one thing remained missing for me: the programmes just didn’t seem to communicate the stories that were unique to the site.
Many educational and even interpretive programmes suffer from this. The stories are generic and if you hadn’t made the trip you may well not know where exactly you’ve landed. Just try and google ‘Victorian Christmas’ these days, and you will find sites as varied as the Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham Abbey, UK (an industrial heritage site) and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, USA. Activities tend to centre on the same theme of Victorian gifts and decorations. No sense of place there.
It is of course tempting to go for the ‘tried and tested’. Victorian Christmas events are hugely popular, and the Victorians are a topic prescribed in the curricula across Britain. You will have an audience, no doubt, but after their visit people (and pupils) will not be able to tell their experiences at your site apart from what they’ve had last year at a different site.
Is this good enough? Will it be enough to convince visitors and funders when times get rough that your site is unique and worth the effort? You can probably guess that my answer is no. Any house that was in use during Victorian times can serve the Victorian theme purpose, but only Montgomery Place can tell the story of the first General killed in the American War of Independence, and his widow who became a national icon for decades and who remained committed to him for the rest of her life. That is the story of the site.
And to uncover that story is what significance assessments are for. I’ve previously written about the importance of (inclusive) significance assessments. Sometimes these uncover conflicting stories, but in many cases they will identify a shared core that should become the spine of any interpretation. In my opinion, only that spine can hold up what you do. If you ignore it in any aspect of your site presentation – be it through educational programmes or events – you weaken your sense of place.
This does not mean that your site is condemned to obscurity if it doesn’t fit the most popular demands. For school programmes it is often a simple matter of demonstrating how the experiences and activities which the site’s core story offers support pupils in similar ways as the popular topics do. The site may also offer a unique angle on the popular theme that teachers will value because they can explore it nowhere else. This requires more creativity and forward thinking from interpreters but it also avoids reducing the site’s story to the point of irrelevance.
Nicole Deufel's Blog 