Week 2 My role as an environmental interpreter
Describe your ideal role of environmental interpreter. What might it entail? Where might it be? What skills might you need? (Keep these all-in mind as you begin to work on your assignments – tailor these to that ideal job!)
When I call it a day and am off to sleep, I think about the events, choices and attitudes of the day just passed. The most fulfilling days always involve time spent in the outdoors, having used my mind, my body, learned something new, and having had the opportunity to get to know or spend time with the people around me. I love speaking with others, learning their world views, and the differences and similarities between myself and the given person, or group of people.
This being said, my ideal job, or role in an environmental interpretation position is one where I am outside, working as a discovery facilitator, and one where I am active throughout the day. It is a dream job of mine to work as a hiking guide or a bikepacking tour guide in a national park! I’m graduating this year and am applying to jobs with these roles involved in them! I am so nervous but cannot wait to see how things go!
Based on my previous experience, as mentioned in the last post, I had the chance to work in a nature interpretation role with BC parks! It gave me a lot of insight into how differently people learn, and how what works really well for some people, makes no sense to others. Age is also a big factor, I was better at working with the adults at the interpretation events than kids. However I must say, that the enthusiasm of kids discovering and learning in the outdoors cannot be beat! It was really helpful, as noted in the readings, to build a sense of rapport between you and those being communicated with, it really makes people listen to what you say because they know where your credibility lies, and how it fits within theirs. It develops a sense of trust and friendship which can make learning what otherwise could be dry information, interesting, digestible and meaningful.
I need to do some more research on how to appeal to different learning styles, but I think it is hard to make plans without having a good understanding of the audience first. How one actually intends to play to different learning styles is very context specific. I suppose the solution, to this, and the best quality, most accessible nature interpretation is to always play to different learning styles and just be adaptable as the audience makes their ways known. There could be visual learners so always having maps, diagrams images, paper and pencils on hand could be good ideas. For those who tend towards kinesthetic learning, making sure there is a physical component to the information, a game, a hike, or bike while learning about different species for example. Understanding that there are active and reflexive listeners, sensing and intuitive listeners, sequential and global learners, and then just playing to the needs of individuals in the given group is I think the best way to go. This is something I’ve learned that I need to make sure to focus on when doing nature interpretation in the future.
I think that its worth mentioning that even if someone is a specific type of learner they still have much to gain from learning in other ways as well. There are simply some things that cannot be learned through one type of learning. One cannot learn how to ride a bike by drawing it out, the drawing could help demonstrate the information, but learning to ride a bike will always be a kinesthetic task. I would expect that everyone has a different balance of the types of learning, but that everyone makes some use of them all at some point. This is a viewpoint I plan to take with me into any nature interpreting career. Always include all the learning styles, but don’t focus too hard to cater to one specific type while neglecting the others. Catering to the individuals, and crowd but still being realistic!
A fun aside (an app I really enjoy using myself):
An app that could be relevant to readers! i-naturalist is a great app for learning about species in the outdoors. You can upload a photo, make a guess as to what you think it is, and you then find out if you are correct on the app. It is also super fascinating because it catalogs and records all the sightings of species and keeps the data for science and the public to use!
Another gif! Go adventure in the outdoors!