Course ID

 

Name: Certified Interpretive Guide (CIG) course

 

Duration: 40 hours

 

Designed for: guides and other professionals who present natural and / or cultural heritage. Though no previous experience in interpretation is required, basic experience in guiding is needed.

 

Subjects covered: personal interpretation, communication skills, accessibility for all, interpretive critiquing, sustainability, meaning making.

This 40-hour hands-on course provides a versatile toolkit to turn any heritage phenomenon into an experience and passive audiences into active participants.

 

Trainees practice how to put strong ideas into words to engage visitors in a meaningful and memorable way. The course offers participants a variety of challenging exercises, building their confidence and creativity to develop, deliver and evaluate great interpretive talks and walks.

 

Finally, using 20 tried-and-tested benchmark quality criteria, trainees discover innovative ways to interact with the public, providing greater visitor satisfaction.

 

The course content includes:

  • Facilitating first-hand experience with natural and cultural heritage sites and objects
  • Dealing with tangible and intangible heritage
  • Revealing meanings and relationships of natural and cultural phenomena
  • Deriving attractive themes from sites, objects and factual information
  • Reacting to the needs and expectations of participants during interpretive activities
  •  Playing different roles as an interpretive guide
  • Using questioning techniques and other communication tools
  • Exercising different forms of group formation and the use of props
  • Connecting information to the participants‘ world
  • Considering the meaning of barriers and interferences in interpretive processes
  • Peer coaching and critiquing interpretive activities
  • Integrating sustainability aspects and global concerns into interpretive activities.

 

To be certified as an interpretive guide, trainees must have previous guiding experience and attend the entire course. The certification process itself consists of a written test, the development of an interpretive walk, the delivery of one interpretive talk and a critiquing exercise.