Teaching Guides to Interpret Biodiversity Conservation

Hurdles to Teaching Interpretation

Stelmach continues:

[The student's] message: The indigenous children work very hard in impoverished conditions, with very few opportunities. "Yes, I know… that is an intense message for someone who is supposedly learning how to be a nature guide... But that was the aspect of the area that most captured this student's imagination, and the tour that he conducted demonstrated that he has learned to be an effective nature guide or interpreter.

Teaching English as a foreign language had already been a well-developed field. Even teaching knowledge of the natural environment is, relatively, not that difficult. But interpretation still has to jump many hurdles before it becomes a highly effective part of NGTP. Consider the following challenges.

Language. Natural history interpretation is story telling. In Spanish the word "story" is translated to "cuento," whose implication is fiction, like myths and legends. When one adds the word "natural" to it, it becomes a myth or legend that takes place in nature. If one uses the word "historia" with local people, they understand it as historical description with dates and places. Thus the very concept of extracting meaning and packaging it as a story continues to be a linguistic hurdle for Spanish speakers with little literary experience.

Culture. A great chasm exists between tourists' expectations and way of seeing the world and local people. Local guides often do not perceive problems concerning the use of water from the local well, eating rice and beans at every meal, sitting under the tropical sun for an hour, or traveling to an entirely new place with a new language. The worries and interests of visitors are often opaque to local guides, whose only experience in traveling, ironically, could be the course itself that visits three different training sites.

20 Characteristics of a Good Guide

A good guide…

1. Speaks loudly and clearly

2. Uses non-verbal communication

3. Acts professionally

4. Prepares in advance

5. Provides necessary information for tourists

6. Involves the audience

7. Uses objects on every tour

8. Knows the audience

9. Has a message for every presentation

10. Prepares structure for a presentation

11. Suggests a relevant conservation action

12. Uses interesting language

13. Is a good birder

14. Manages the group

15. Uses basic first aid

16. Handles difficult questions

17. Carries appropriate equipment

18. Evaluates a presentation at the end

19. Uses the ABCs of design

20. Follows up with the visitors

for every good story, there must be a story teller, an interpreter, or a naturalist guide. But for this person to connect the natural resource with its potential supporters, many hurdles must be jumped.

The hurdles related to conservation interpretation can be especially difficult if the person telling the story has only a primary school education, is rural, speaks a different language and lives in a different culture than the audience, with little experience in traveling or interacting with visitors, or understanding tourism, education, or a culture of service. RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, a US-based conservation non-profit, has been jumping some of these hurdles in Central America since 1994 with the development of its bilingual Nature Guide Training Program.

Birth of Bilingual Nature Guide Training

Megan Stelmach has been on the program's teaching staff for three different nature guide programs. In her final report, she described her model student, which is excerpted throughout this story. RARE Center hopes by increasingly overcoming the barriers to the program, this kind of student becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Stelmach writes:

A few days before graduation I went on a final practice tour with a student. This student and his tour remind me why this course works. He is from Xcalak, Quintana Roo, Mexico [lowland, part of Yucatan Peninsula], and for the first time he is learning about the indigenous culture of the Chiapas Highlands. The third and final site of this course is located outside the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas, in a mini-zoo setting with pockets of indigenous communities all around.

RARE Center first entered the field of nature guide training in Costa Rica in 1994 when after surveying Latin American conservation organizations, it perceived a great need for local, bilingual nature guides. Frequently biologists from capital cities or foreigners imported by tour operators would bring tourists to national parks and then take them, and the earnings, away leaving little to motivate local constituents. So RARE Center invited WorldTeach, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit that sends volunteer English teachers around the world on one-year assignments to join forces in the first Nature Guide Training Program (NGTP).

Types of Support from Tourists and Local Community Visitors

Become a member of the administrating organization
Give a monetary donation
Donate objects such as computer equipment, old binoculars, radios, camera equipment
Donate services like translation, financial analysis, artwork, computer skills such as web design or desktop publishing
Donate quality trip photographs of protected area
Donate books (such as old field guides or anything related to nature or the tropics) or magazines
Procure volunteers to work with the foundation
Make contacts for park management with university research programs, donor agencies, Rotary Clubs, and other organizations that exchange students, send equipment to developing countries, and so forth
Promote the park to get other tourists to go
Set up pen pals with local schools in both countries
Fill out evaluation form if there is one; consider writing a letter to the guide or the director stating the good and bad of the tour, the bad being constructive criticism intended to improve service
Clean up projects (trash)
Perform habitat restoration (plant strategic trees, build bird boxes), adopt-a-creek or -species
Letter writing to politicians, newspapers, and those involved in tourism
Report illegal action
Patrol beaches (to protect nesting sea turtles)
Form ecological clubs in park
Hold fund raising events
Protect wildlife from pets and other domestic animals
Eliminate exotic species and plant natives
And much, much more…

German Martinez, a nature guide for Pico Bonito National Park in northern Honduras, surveys the Cuero y Salado mangrove swamp during his nature guide training in 1997.

Education. Education is the high hurdle. Even when a student has a lot of education in years, that education can be poor. One park director in Honduras notes that local university students often graduate without ever having had to write a bibliographic citation. Many do not know how to outline a paper, take good notes, use a library, a computer, or manage basic spelling. These are simple skills compared to higher order cognitive skills required to be an interpreter. He or she must be a critical thinker able to observe a site, boil down its contents, extract the essence, render it into interpretive form for a particular audience, and then communicate it. When the norm is memorization, not interpretation, students tend only to describe the barrel rather than reaching deep into the barrel and extracting the meaning.

Methodologies of Teaching Interpretation

Stelmach continues:

After the initial introduction of the tour, this student took me to the sole watering hole that exists in the area of our site. The student explained that this watering hole (a hole in the ground with brown water) provides almost 10 families in the area with all the water they need for washing, cooking, bathing, agriculture, etc. I was asked to carry a bucket of water from this hole up a hill to the next stop on the tour. This activity was a demonstration of the daily work performed by a child from a Tzotzil family in this area.

The course falls on the shoulders of the three field coordinators, supported by the NGTP director based in Antigua, Guatemala. The coordinators include the training coordinator who is in charge of pedagogy, student and teacher management; the bilingual natural history coordinator is in charge of all site-specific knowledge about culture and nature; and the program coordinator manages the project.

Despite the modern pedagogy the course employs, interpretation has always been a challenge. In Central America, the concept and its practice are nearly non-existent, even among well-established tour operators. Teaching people with little classroom experience has required an almost complete abandonment of theory. RARE staff replaced Ham's Environmental Interpretation (Interpretación Ambiental in Spanish), a reference for an educated audience, with perhaps the most important innovation in the program's pedagogical arsenal: the 20 Characteristics of a Good Guide (see sidebar). During the ten-week course, teachers present 1-3 characteristics per week. Each characteristic is written in simple language having one or more lesson plans associated with it that can last from a couple of hours to several days to teach.

The sequential unveiling creates suspense at the same time avoids overwhelming students with many principles. The order has been meticulously determined to fit this training program for conservation interpretive guides. It considers difficulty, need for English, pre-requisites, balance with other weekly learning objectives, amount of practice necessary to learn the characteristic, and general importance to a guide in this context.

When guides combine these characteristics, they have the basic building block of interpretation, the guided tour. Students start out the course giving a 5-minute tour in English and by the end, they are giving 45-minute tours. While still short, in 45 minutes most of the relevant 20 characteristics can be illustrated. After the course, graduates are expected to specialize. They work as guides on motor boats in mangrove swamps (Honduras), kayak guides to view gray whales (Gulf of California, Mexico), bird guides (Costa Rica), mountaineering guides (Honduras), fly fishing guides (Yucatan, Mexico), snorkeling guides (Bay Islands, Honduras), and wildflower guides (South Africa).

Interestingly, students rarely hear the word interpretation because the interpretive actions are smoothly integrated into their daily activities. All subject matter is integrated together to the greatest extent possible, since in real life, knowledge does not come in convenient packages as in school. In one lesson, a guide could be studying present tense interrogatives (English) by asking tourists to describe their own experiences (interpretive technique) on the topic of bird watching (natural history).

To capture a program's experience, RARE Center develops program manuals (five thus far) that can be used by in-country counterparts to carry out the program, building local capacity and freeing RARE to work on other projects. But the nature guide manual is unique in its magnitude: it contains five volumes and over 1800 pages:

1. Program management for the program coordinator
2. Lesson plans for the training and natural history coordinators and teachers
3. Teacher training for the training coordinator
4. Model "textbook" for students
5. Model English workbook for students

A student nature guide interprets the blossoming of a flower.

A common fallacy in the development field is that a training workshop or course is enough to bring a student to skill proficiency. Similarly, since problems are so urgent, there is often a great rush to see results. Donors have short funding cycles and short-term expectations of one-shot trainings. These beliefs often lead to ineffective trainings.

NGTP itself suffered from a limited vision. It has always had one-month of follow-up after graduation where teachers visit graduates in their sites for a few days to a couple of weeks helping them with their new tasks. They are usually warmly received, there are a few classes in English, some discussions of a tour, and the teachers leave. Then, many graduates begin a slow regression. Some lose their English first, others drop the arduous task of writing up interpretive messages and outlines. They do not practice. Their skills fade.

Simply put, almost all of the real learning takes place after the initial three-month course. The course introduces skills, allows them to be practiced, but they are not turned into habits, not learned deeply until many months of use later.

RARE came to realize this and converted its course into a program. The three-month intensive immersion now constitutes only one part of a larger year and a half program. After the course, teachers can volunteer to stay on an additional six-months and work with guides in the field. The program coordinator makes site visits; there is a six-month in-service training and a one-year evaluation workshop. RARE now does more to track its graduates to link them with new opportunities. There are even workshops to work with guide supervisors so they learn how to work with and improve guides' skills.

Vision of Conservation Interpretation

Stelmach continues:

...The ability of this student to take various components of his surroundings, and weave them together into a coherent and complete tour with a central message, demonstrates the potential of students from NGTP. This student will not give tours about Tzotzil families in his community in Quintana Roo, but he can use his interpretive skills form coherent conservation messages in his community, where he will speak about mangroves and the coral reef.

There are several models that explain how guides might effect conservation. Most involve economic multiplier effects due to salaries and attracting tourists who spend more money in the community. There is also future conservation potential through education. These approaches are hard to measure and their impact is questionable. The hypothesis that RARE has been building into its program is one pioneered by Tom O'Brien of Lindblad Expeditions and Sam Ham of the University of Idaho.

Lindblad Expeditions is an ecotour operator that offers cruises of several days throughout the world. Their 80-passenger boats have onboard naturalists whose interpretive approach raises $4,000 per week for Galapagos National Park. O'Brien explains, "We have developed a coordinated interpretive strategy for our naturalists that defines how specific conservation messages are introduced over the course of the visitor experience. That coordinated communication of specific messages is critical, and that is what I would apply to any visitor experience, no matter how long or short."

RARE hopes that its graduates who interact with tourists in general for only a few hours, can also develop additional sources of support for conservation.

Interpretation used to win visitors' concern for a site and its conservation problem can generate many kinds of support (see side bar). Helping graduates and their organizations gain significant donations is NGTP's biggest hurdle over which the program must jump. If guides can consistently generate new revenues and other forms of support for protected areas, then RARE will have taken another important step toward using ecotourism as a tool to promote tropical conservation.

Stelmach concludes:

I share this example because it is why I have loved my work with RARE, and why I believe in NGTP. The guides gain truly valuable skills, which more often than not completely change their understanding of the natural environment. And, when successful transitions are made back into their communities, these skills translate into responsible conservation pedagogy in their home parks.

Jon Kohl is Manager for Public Use Planning at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, was Program Manager for the first Honduras NGTP in 1997, and is co-author of the NGTP Methodological Manual. He can be reached via www.jonkohl.com. Cynthia Brown was Program Manager for two NGTPs in Yucatan, Training Coordinator for one NGTP in Yucatan, and WorldTeach volunteer for one NGTP in Baja California. She is a co-author of the NGTP Methodological Manual and currently teaches in Massachusetts. Matt Humke, Manager for NGTP, was a WorldTeach teacher in the first Baja California NGTP in 1995. For further information on NGTP, visit www.worldteach.org or www.rarecenter.org/ecdp. You may direct related correspondence to mhumke@ rarecenter.org.

Since publication of this article, Cynthia Mayoral (Brown) has become manager of nature guide training and can be reached at cmayoral@ rarecenter.org.

Even though six years' experience has been written down, the manual spends much time describing the manifold ways to modify the course to each site's and set of collaborators' realities. Also, despite the manual's appearance of completion, RARE recognizes there have been many small victories along the trail to conservation, but that this program still merely introduces interpretive guiding to students. In fact, only after the course do they face perhaps the biggest hurdle of all.

The Course Becomes a Program

Stelmach continues:

...We emerged into a clearing where we could see the home of a Tzotzil family. The guide remained respectful of the family space by not intruding, yet he managed to offer much information on the customs, clothing (showing various hand-embroidered objects), religion, family structure, language and work ethic. And finally this guide concluded by reading an authentic letter written by a Tzotzil child which detailed the difficulty the child had obtaining an education, escaping his father's blows, and having a future different from his parents.

This student, nature guide, interpreter, had successfully explained the reality of one Tzotzil child. He had made sense of what, to me, would have otherwise been a completely inaccessible topic.