A couple of weeks prior to this writing, I was sitting in the NAI National Office participating in our latest strategic planning exercise with the NAI Board of Directors and staff. As one would expect in such a setting, we bantered around many a definition, purpose, philosophy or a principle of interpretation. One apparent theme kept emerging as we traversed the steps of organizing our plans for the future of interpreters and interpretation – we tell stories. We are the storytellers that reveal intimacies of our animate and inanimate spirit of our existence on this planet and beyond. All of this discussion of identifying who we are as heritage interpreters reminded me of an exercise I have used in classrooms and training sessions.
A few years ago someone shared the most succinct definition of interpretation with me – tell stories and always tell the truth! I couldn’t argue with that. Having repeated that definition for years, I added one more component and started referring to it as the SET method for interpretation. Today, I still use this concept to define interpretation to those within and outside of interpretation.
SET consists of three basic ideas around which I believe interpretation revolves. First is the STORY. Unquestionably the best interpreters are those that can take any object, concept, or fact and intertwine it with one’s imagination, life experiences and curiosity in a macramé of personal relevance. We may call it themes, objectives, information, cognitive content or anything in-between, but the bottom line is that it is the story that an interpreter reveals to the listener. This certainly is very difficult to do without having EMPATHY for the patron of the story being told. I used to call this an intimacy-specific communication process. To achieve the magic of having each audience member believe he or she is being spoken to as an individual is the achievement of audience empathy. Finally, it can be strongly argued that interpreters have an ethical obligation to always tell the TRUTH in their presentation of their story. I believe that the “Seventh Principle” of interpretation should be that all interpretative efforts must be linked to a personal and professional commitment to being truthful in presenting information to the public. Legitimacy of the storyteller is directly linked to his or her integrity in being trusted by the audience member. I am reminded of the old Sufi saying, telling the truth is always the right choice in life.
As we ponder the many acronyms we are developing for defining and explaining the essence of heritage interpretation, I too am SET to throw in my contribution to the mix. For me the Story-Empathy-Truth conceptualization has been a simple way to define what I do as an interpreter.
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