Imagine two candidates have applied to volunteer as docent interpreters at your historic site.
Gerald has been fascinated by the place for thirty years. He has read every book ever published about it. He knows the names of all the previous owners, can explain exactly how the steam engine works, and has strong opinions about an error in the 1987 restoration of the north wing.
Susan knows almost nothing about the place. Until last Tuesday, she thought the steam engine was a tractor.
But Susan spent 30 years teaching Grade 3. She can walk into a classroom and tell within seconds who is interested, who is confused, who is bored, and who desperately needs to go to the bathroom. She asks good questions. She listens to the answers. She can explain something three different ways without making anyone feel stupid.
Who would you recruit? I’m increasingly convinced that too many heritage organizations are choosing Gerald. The research suggests we should give Susan a much closer look.
What makes a good docent?
I recently did a dive into the research on educational volunteers in museums, historic sites, parks, zoos, aquariums, and similar settings. The literature is surprisingly thin and fragmented: we know much less about docent effectiveness than you might expect after generations of relying on volunteers to deliver heritage education.
But one finding comes through fairly consistently: knowing a lot of stuff does not, by itself, make someone a good interpreter.
A 2022 study looked at 594 visitors to art and history museums in Toronto and examined which guide competencies predicted visitor learning. Three broad areas mattered: handling groups in the museum environment, communication skills, and knowledge and pedagogy. Most interestingly, competencies that encouraged interaction and active participation were common predictors across all of the learning outcomes the researchers measured.
Other research paints a similar picture. Effective guides communicate clearly, facilitate discussion, read group dynamics, adapt to different audiences, and use their knowledge flexibly. They don’t simply know the material; they know what to do with it.
This should have some fairly profound implications for how we recruit volunteers.
Knowledge is important. But knowledge is teachable.
Obviously, your interpreters need to know what they’re talking about.
If Gerald knows the steam engine was installed in 1903 and Susan thinks it was invented by Thomas Edison, some work remains to be done.
But here’s the important distinction: we can teach Susan about the steam engine. She’s a teacher; she’s fully accustomed to assimilating a mountain of information in a short time—and then sharing it.
We can give her readings. We can introduce her to the curator. We can let her handle the collection. We can have her shadow experienced interpreters. We can give her opportunities to practise, ask questions, and gradually develop expertise.
Turning Gerald into someone who is genuinely curious about strangers may be a more ambitious undertaking.
The research doesn’t suggest that subject knowledge is unimportant. Quite the opposite: knowledge and pedagogy are among the competencies most associated with visitor learning. But knowledge works in combination with communication, group handling, judgement, and the ability to involve visitors actively.
Qualitative research on museum docents reaches much the same conclusion from another direction. Good docents continually adapt both their content and their approach to the people in front of them. They make choices in real time about what to pursue, what to skip, when to ask a question, and when to stop talking.
That’s interpretation. Knowing everything on the researcher’s briefing sheet isn’t.
There’s another version of Gerald that anyone who has managed volunteers will recognize.
Some people are drawn to heritage sites mainly because they adore the subject matter—and would frankly prefer to spend their time with it uninterrupted by the public. Railway museums attract people who really, really like trains. Zoos attract people who really, really like animals. Observatories attract people who just want to look at globular clusters. Ask me how I know this.
In my zoo days, we occasionally attracted prospective volunteers whose principal motivation, it eventually became clear, was getting closer to the animals. They were prepared to tolerate visitors as part of the bargain, but actually engaging with those visitors wasn’t necessarily in the plan. Once deployed, some could blend almost invisibly into the background plantings, like a Caribbean reef octopus waiting unnoticed as the public passes by.
These weren’t bad volunteers. Some were knowledgeable, committed, and extraordinarily generous with their time. The problem was simpler: we had matched them with a job they didn’t particularly want to do.
Loving animals isn’t the same as loving talking to people about animals. Loving trains isn’t the same as wanting to help a six-year-old discover why trains are interesting. And loving history certainly isn’t the same as being curious about the people who have come to experience it.
For visitor-facing interpretation, that distinction matters enormously.
Recruit for the work you actually need done
So perhaps we should stop asking only:
How much do you know about our site and subject matter?
And start asking:
Can you get a conversation going with strangers?
What do you do when nobody answers your question?
Can you tell when you’ve lost an audience?
Can you explain something complicated simply?
What happens when a visitor disagrees with you?
Do you actually like people?
That last one may be worth asking twice.
Changing the audition
This doesn’t require an elaborate new recruitment system. In fact, you can simplify yours. I think I would probably learn more from watching a prospective docent interact with three actual humans for ten minutes than from sitting down and interviewing a candidate for an hour.
Or give candidates a simple object and ask them to engage a small group with it. Put them alongside an experienced interpreter for half an hour. Ask them to explain something they know well to someone who knows nothing about it. Give them a realistic preview of the job. And then look for curiosity, warmth, adaptability, listening, judgement, and the ability to make another person feel interesting.
The research review suggests exactly this kind of recruitment approach: short interviews, observed interaction exercises, realistic role previews, and matching volunteers to different roles according to their strengths.
None of this means we should turn away Gerald. Gerald’s extraordinary knowledge may be a tremendous asset. He might be brilliant with specialist tours, research, demonstrations, collections work, or visitors who share his fascination with steam technology. But let’s make sure Gerald can read the audience before we give him an unsuspecting family from Ohio.
Because the goal isn’t to find people who already know everything about our site. It’s to find people who can help other people become interested in it. Those aren’t quite the same thing.
Read more
Demirović Bajrami, D., Vuksanović, N., Petrović, M. D., & Tretiakova, T. N. (2022). Competencies of a Museum Guide as Predictors of Visitors’ Learning Outcomes: A Case from Canada. Journal of Museum Education, 47(2), 251–262. The study of 594 Toronto museum visitors is particularly useful for connecting guide competencies with visitor learning outcomes.
Neill, A. C. (2010). Providing a Tailored Educational Interaction with Cultural Treasures: A Study of Museum Docents.Useful qualitative research on how effective docents adapt their interactions to different visitors.
Lin, J., & Ormsby, A. A. (2021). Evaluating the Impact of Volunteers Serving Public Lands. Particularly useful for its findings on skills-based recruitment and the management of volunteer programs in parks and public lands.
My name is Don Enright.
I specialize in heritage site renewal. I help parks, historic sites, zoos, aquariums and other organizations increase their reach, relevance, revenue, community engagement, and satisfaction.
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