Creating an Interpretive Program - Part 3: The Message

In this third installment of Creating an Interpretive Program, the parts discussed previously are coming together to form the message, sometimes called the theme. However, while many agencies and organizations use "theme", they tend to confuse the issue of what "theme" means since there are many meanings of the word theme. The interpretation of theme that this post will use is a theme in the sense of a "message" or a thesis, rather than theme as a topic. This is crucial because the message of a program is very different than the topic of a program. It is an incredibly crucial step in the creative process, but it is very challenging to write about and provide pictures for, so try to bear up and endure.

The job of the interpreter is to connect visitors to the resources in a meaningful way, so the interpreters must provide the opportunity for the visiting public to explore the ideas and significant aspects of the resource in order to make sense of them in their own personal way. Not all visitors will come away with the exact same experience, and if they come away with the exact same experience, they did not really have an interpretive experience but a lesson. Remember, Tilden's sixth principle is not to instruct but to provoke and so by telling them what they should know, think, or feel, that it is not real interpretation. So it starts with the significance of the resources themselves.

Places set aside for the enjoyment, learning, or appreciation for visitors will inherently have some significance or value. The degree of significance is dependent on who or what administers it. Is it a national level significance? A national level entity probably administers it. Same applies to state or local locations. Private holdings really kind of depend. For example, George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, is a run by private association but has arguably a national level of significance. We attach meanings to places, people, and things and the significance comes from how powerful, profound, or wide reaching the meanings are for these things. The significance can be found in the intangible meanings and in their tangible meanings as well and generally have a wide appeal. The significance of the tangible resource can be put into statements that are part of the flow and process of making a message for your visitors. According to Richard Kohen and Kim Sikoryak's book on interpretation, "Meaningful Interpretation," the significance statements "are factual statements that include enough context to make them meaningful, summarizing the importance of these resources to our natural and cultural heritage" and is the first step in creating a interpretive message. Significance answers the question, "So what? Why does any of this matter?" In high school, we did ID/Sigs as homework and doing this following exercise may be helpful to creating and isolating significance statements. First we ID'd the resource and then described it. Then the significance of this resource was described. Here is one example using a real resource, Fort Scott in Kansas, where I worked for a season. One possibility of a significance statement might be "The first black soldiers to fight for the Union during the Civil War were first enlisted at Fort Scott".

The interpretive message has two levels: primary messages and sub-themes. The primary are the overarching stories about the resources. Sub-themes are the smaller-scale stories within and make up the primary. The narrower scope encourages the exploration of specific ideas in greater depth. Sub-themes are the specific themes used to develop individual interpretive services or techniques.

Characteristics common to all primary themes and sub-themes include:

• Each is based on the significance of resources (arrows in above image)
• Each is the essence of a story used to help visitors explore the multiple significant facets of resources.
• Each connects resources to larger ideas, meanings, beliefs, and values.
• Each is best stated as a single sentence that includes tangible and intangible elements. Single sentence structure forces theme writers to focus their ideas. An interpretive theme is never stated as a topic. While topics can be useful in organizing a body of work, topics alone do not provide sufficient interpretive focus. Since topics are written in one or several words such as geology, southwest history, etc, their meanings are too ambiguous to be useful as themes. Structuring themes as complete sentences ensures a more coherent development of related ideas.
• Each incorporates universal concepts: big ideas that mean something to everyone, though not the same thing to everyone. The use of universal concepts enables a wide and diverse range of people to find personal paths to connection to the stories of the place and its resources.
• Each provides opportunities for people to explore the meanings of the place and its resources, without telling people what resources should mean to them. 

An example of the Primary Interpretive Message might go like this (still using Fort Scott as an example): The black soldiers recruited at Fort Scott were the first of any state in the Union to fight for their freedom. The universal concept could be struggle for freedom. A subtheme might be the enthusiastic black communities in Kansas that filled not one regiment but two. An interpretive service or technique for illustrating this would be a map that described free black communities in Kansas or a newspaper from such a community advertising for recruits.

With all that in mind, a single statement sentence that summarizes and articulates the interpreter wants to develop will be the core around which the interpretive program will be built around. It is based upon the significance of the resource and guides the development and the ultimate presentation of the program. It should include both intangible and universal connections. Since there are a lot of things to consider in making a message statement, it will not be easy to do, nor will it come quickly. This is not a 5 minute exercise on a single draft. This is not a last minute job. Creating a message takes time, crafting, editing, revising, probably some collaboration, and re-doing if need be. There is a lot to consider when making a message so take the time to do it right and keep checking to see that it makes tangible, intangible, and universal connections as well as fit the Primary Message and Subtheme characteristics. The message must also be relevant as anything that is not will not be as powerful. Since some of the ideas can be quite complex, try keeping to one idea at a time when constructing a message as this will quickly complicate the overall message that will be delivered.

On Oct 29, 1862, 240 black troops from the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry were sent to rout out bushwhackers, Confederate guerrillas, in Bates County, Missouri at a place called Island Mound and according to reports fought valiantly. Up until then, black soldiers were used for menial labor, even though they enlisted as soldiers, but their courage and ferocity turned the opinions against using black troops in combat as news about the success of the skirmish spread.

Previously, the success or failure of an interpretive program used to be measured by how well visitors could remember and state the theme of the program. This lead to programs that were designed to be easily remembered with a recurring theme statement that made it easy for visitors to recall when evaluated. By doing this, the message became a take home lesson that failed to create a personal meaning for the visitors since they were told what and why the resource was significant.

I'm not so brilliant to come up with all of this on my own, I had some help sorting this topic from this website and will go into greater detail than I can spend time doing on this blog:
 https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/eastern/meaningful_interpretation/mi2c.htm