NCPH 2013 Group Consulting Award (Part 2): Synergies and cross-purposes

04 April 2013 – Anne Mitchell Whisnant

Editors’ Note:  This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field.  Today’s post is the second in a two-part series by Marla Miller and Anne Whisnant, two of the four authors of Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, winner of the 2013 NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award in the group category.

In Part 1 of this post, we reviewed some of the progress that has been made in the year since we finished Imperiled Promise.  Today, we raise some concerns about how two more recent high-profile NPS reports could work at cross-purposes with ours, and suggest how our colleagues can help keep the conversations about improving historical practice in the agency moving ahead.

Two NPS reports that could work against the recommendations in Imperiled Promise were issued last summer, a few months after our report debuted.  Revisiting Leopold, written by a committee of prominent scientists, focused on the future of “resource management” (both natural and cultural) in the NPS.  And Identifying Best Practices for Live Interpretive Programs in the United States National Park Service, completed by a team of researchers from Clemson University and Virginia Tech with backgrounds in environmental education and conservation, offered a study of immediate visitor responses to NPS interpretive programs.  Both reports, commissioned (as ours was) by offices of the NPS, are receiving high-level circulation among Service leadership, and, in the case of Revisiting Leopold, the endorsement of the Director himself.

In a broad sense, Revisiting Leopold and Imperiled Promise advance many parallel observations. Both emphasize that NPS’s internal, professional scholarly capacity (in their terms, “science”; in ours, “history”) is insufficient to meet future management challenges.  Both articulate the need for greater bonds of connection between research, management and interpretation.  And both emphasize seeing parks in their larger contexts—in a wider framing of significance, story, and meaning that will bolster both scientific and historical understanding.

Despite these synergies, Revisiting Leopold could undercut our efforts as it subsumes all “scholarship” under the rubric of “science” without making space for the different (and equally valid) types of approaches humanists and historians take.  Additionally, Leopold discusses “cultural resources” within a frame of “historical authenticity,” “accuracy,” and a sort of factual finality that Imperiled Promise (and current history scholarship) eschews.   In other words, while Revisiting Leopold makes admirable attempts to incorporate history and culture into its conceptualization of “resources,” it does so in ways that represent a step backward for NPS history.

Identifying Best Practices, a study of immediate post-program visitor satisfaction with of 376 NPS ranger-lead interpretive programs across 24 parks, attempts to tease out the specific characteristics that make for effective NPS interpretive programs.  Many of the programs analyzed were conducted at historical or cultural sites.

As with Revisiting Leopold, there are points of clear connection between Identifying Best Practices and Imperiled Promise.  We are heartened, in particular, by the positive associations IBP identifies between an interpreter’s deep knowledge of and personal passion for relevant material, his or her ability to deploy that knowledge in flexible and responsive ways, and visitors’ engagement with park programs.

But the particular framing of those conclusions concerns us.  Identifying Best Practices correlates visitor satisfaction most highly with interpreter “confidence,” “eloquence,” “apparent knowledge,” “emotion,” and “charisma.” Effective interpreters, meanwhile, the report advises, should avoid “focusing on knowledge gain as the program’s central goal and communicating solely factual information” (p. 5).

Imperiled Promise argues that these capabilities can be significantly strengthened through advanced historical training.  Identifying Best Practices, though, seems to skirt that question as it identifies the knowledgeable “walking encyclopedia” interpreter as an ineffective type and emphasizes how the report’s findings should inform training regarding interpretive technique (specifically, by teaching the importance of engaging and confident storytelling and methods of connecting emotionally with visitors).  This approach, it seems to us, implicitly reinforces the interpreter-historian divide Imperiled Promise urged that NPS bridge, and does not fully engage the question of whether the quality and soundness of the scholarship undergirding an interpretive program, or the depth of an interpreter’s content education (and, we would assert, resulting confidence in handling the material) make any difference at all.

Finally, Identifying Best Practices also diverges from Imperiled Promise by basing its conclusions on a short-term “visitor satisfaction” model that takes little notice of new thinking in visitor studies that looks in more complicated ways into what visitors bring to sites, what they look for there, and what of value and meaning they take with them—in the longer term—when they leave (something that, to be sure, would be nearly impossible to measure with immediate post-program surveys).

All of this to say, a year after Imperiled Promise’s publication, that we are delighted that NCPH has recognized us, via the Excellence in Consulting Award, for the quality of what we produced.  But the reality is that the work is just beginning.  Without ongoing engagement—even vigilance, and sustained effort—by the study team, the OAH, NCPH, and our colleagues at all levels within NPS—it will be all too easy for the next report to push Imperiled Promise down the list.  And if the next reports continue to reflect existing NPS silos, categories, and emphases, it will be much easier to set aside one like Imperiled Promise, which takes a cross-cutting, historical, analytical, and integrative approach that questions some fundamental NPS assumptions, and that calls for significant new thinking, reorganization, and investment to realize its goals.

Last year, at the joint OAH/NCPH meeting session heralding the debut of Imperiled Promise, we emphasized that the success of the report in catalyzing change would depend upon the work of many people beyond the report’s four authors.  A year in, we feel that your voices are even more important.  How can you help?  Organize a local or regional conversation about Imperiled Promise at your university, site, or park.  Call your colleagues and discuss the study.  Have your students read it.  Blog, tweet and post on Facebook about it.  Ask your congresspersons or senators if they are concerned about the quality of history in the sites in your district.  Bring the report to the attention of superintendents and other NPS historians, interpretive leaders, or planners you may know.  If you are a consulting historian for NPS, ask how your work will be incorporated into interpretive plans or programs.  To succeed, we have to keep discussion buzzing at every level in and around NPS: national, regional, local, organizational, individual.  We’ll be everywhere we can be, and we invite you to join us.

~ Anne Mitchell Whisnant and Marla Miller

Anne Mitchell Whisnant chaired the study team that produced Imperiled Promise. She is Deputy Secretary of the Faculty and Adjunct Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also an active public historian with more than twenty years’ experience working on National Park Service-related projects, including, most recently, Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway.

Marla Miller directs the Public History program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and edits the series Public History in Historical Perspective at the University of Massachusetts Press. She continues to consult on projects for the National Park Service and other history organizations, and is a member of the board of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites.