Certified Interpretive Planner (CIP) course

Course ID

 

Name: Certified Interpretive Planner (CIP) Course

 

Duration: 40 hours


Designed for: professionals who plan heritage sites, such as architects, curators, museologists, managers. Though no previous experience in interpretation is required, it is necessary that trainees know basic planning principles.


Subjects covered: interpretative planning for personal and non-personal media, local engagement, resilience, interpretive evaluation, meaning making.

Interpretive planning combines the needs of the visitor or heritage community, the site management and the heritage itself. It is a tricky balance to find, but once achieved, everyone’s a winner!

 

This 40-hour course considers all kinds of heritage sites. Along Interpret Europe’s interpretive planning framework, participants experience all course content in planning teams, step by step at an original heritage site. Every day, they add new insights to their own planning proposals which they present to each other on the last day of the course.

 

The course content includes:

  • assessing the genius loci of a heritage site
  • evaluating the site experience and interpretive services
  • practising participatory approaches, exchange with and inclusion of stakeholders
  • analysing the difference between facts and meanings
  • developing interpretive themes, considering mental frames and universal values
  • planning engaging interpretive services, including settings and media
  • considering how interpretive services could be designed to be resilient over time
  • integrating aspects of sustainability and human rights into planning
  • exploring different ways of evaluation during planning processes.

 

To be certified as interpretive planners, participants must have some previous planning experience and attend the entire course.

 

The certification process itself consists of the presentation of the interpretive planning proposal developed with their team during the course, a written test, and the development of their own original interpretive plan at a heritage site of their choice after the course has ended.