Product Description

Creating tours that are interesting and educational for visitors (and guides!) is a challenge every historic site faces. "Great Tours!" helps you focus clearly on the material culture and significance of your site and then shows you how to use that focus to train and energize your guides. You will be able to move your tours to a fresh new level that is engaging and educational for visitors of all ages and abilities. Readings and workshop activities frame the process throughout and allow you to develop what is most appropriate for your site, while working to strike a realistic balance between ideals and every day reality. "Great Tours!" offers a unique combination of theoretical guidance and practical activities, supplemented by reproducible forms and a bibliography and index, that make it an invaluable resource for anyone involved with planning tours and training guides.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #891527 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

About the Author
Barbara A. Levy was the Interpretation Planner for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, Planning Division, and later became Director of Education and Interpretation for the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. In 1993 she founded Barbara Levy Associates, a consulting group that has helped history museums and historical organizations improve their interpretation, planning, and education programmes. Sandy Mackenzie Lloyd was the first curator of Wyck, a historic house in Philadelphia, and the curator of education at Cliveden, a property of the National Trust. Susan P. Schreiber is Director of Interpretation and Public Programs for the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., working on the creation of the City Museum of Washington.

Customer Reviews

Great Tours, and Not a Great Book!
I am very disappointed with the book. Just a few ideas are given here and then repeated and repeated and repeated. The authors give very simplified and basic instructions about guide training in a way that can be useful only for schoolteachers in remote areas of Africa.

For instance, they suggest a procedure, which begins with the following operation: "Begin the session with an open discussion. Ask the class: What is material culture? If the class know what it is, ask them to name examples of material culture, both generally and at the site. If they are not familiar with the term (?!?), give a quick accurate definition: material culture is anything shaped by human hands".

An another example is the authors' suggestion to trainers about how to prepare their class on "Identifying the Site's Topics". They say: "Assemble materials. Flip chart pages developed during Activity 2.1 (tape to walls or make available for people to see). Easel, flip chart, and markers of at least four colors." For God's sake, it's about the guide training for conducting historical tours and not about kindergarten activities!

The whole text of approx. 150 pages twirls around a basic idea that 'a great tour' is based on several elements such as storylines, themes, physical evidence, biography of historic personalities and historical context. How to pull it all together is probably a scheduled purpose of the book, but I'm afraid that its authors missed their aim.

A Wonderful Training Guide
This is a wonderful book when used properly. The book is to be used as a training guide for a class or workshop. The book is set up to work out specific excercises for a mock historical site. I took such a workshop through the National Trust in which this book was used. We followed along with the instructor (who used slides, charts, and yes, colored markers--see review below)working in team groups. It has been a valuable reference to refer back to. Even if you do not get to take the workshop put on by the National Trust you could adopt the book to conduct a workshop in your own organization. It empahsizes using historical materials and research available to you to create inclusive narratives based on facts and verifiable, giving authority to your exhibits, rather than leaving visitors with mistruths and misconceptions.