Support and Challenge at Rendezvous

Photo by Warren Bielenberg
Essay by Maria Abonnel

A Response to Director Jarvis's 12/08/09 Keynote Speech
My somewhat impulsive decision to attend my first ever Ranger Rendezvous in Gettysburg, PA, this December, was largely motivated by the fact that the new director of the National Park Service, Jon Jarvis, would be the keynote speaker. Certainly, I was also looking to reconnect with colleagues and with the Service itself. The conference did not disappoint; it was well-organized and there were ample opportunities to mingle. Gettysburg National Military Park, meanwhile, offered several excellent interpretive programs and opportunities.

On December 8, in the hour before Jarvis’s slot on the agenda, an interesting mix of active NPS employees, retirees, and college students began to gather in the main conference room of the hotel. In the midst of this beehive-like atmosphere, I stumbled on Jarvis himself, who had entered the building and was taking lobby coffee and talking with a park ranger in the bar near the entrance. I didn’t recognize him then, just saw two park rangers talking and maybe taking refuge from the energetic buzz happening in the common areas and hallways.

At the designated time, the president of the Association of National Park Rangers (and CNPSR member), A. Scot McElveen, introduced this park ranger as the director. McElveen emphasized that Jarvis was the first director to have been a member of ANPR long before his appointment to the highest position in the agency. That the Administration had selected a career NPS employee to head the agency was not lost on this audience. Extended applause seemed to express gratitude that great consideration had gone into Jarvis’s appointment.

I found Jarvis’s talk both reassuring and challenging. He divided it into two parts, the first a lecture about what he feels are the most important things the NPS needs to be doing right now, the second about twenty minutes for audience questions. Here, I’ll recount his main points and digress occasionally to the questions and thoughts they stimulated within me.

Director Jarvis first identified four key areas of focus for the NPS: stewardship, education, relevance, and workforce. Explaining his emphasis of stewardship, Jarvis asserted that this Administration truly values science, and that parks need to be engaging in discussions with communities at an ecosystem and a landscape scale. To illustrate the current Administration’s support for scientists, Jarvis noted that he and the Secretary of the Interior both had opportunities for direct input in the then-approaching Copenhagen climate change conference. Jarvis also mentioned that he had successfully nominated social scientist Gary Machliss, who has long experience with the National Park Service, as an adviser to the Secretary of the Interior. Jarvis challenged the NPS to provide both national and international leadership in modeling sustainability.

Moving on to discuss education, Jarvis first commented that the NPS should have “no fear of reprisal” for stressing the role of science in its unique role as public educator. As CNPSR members, we probably all have experience with the concept that there are no areas of American history or preservation that come without some kind of inherent conflict. Jarvis cited Gettysburg’s recent move away from focusing on battle strategies and tactics and toward providing broader and more richly meaningful historical context of the causes of the Civil War. As I listened to Jarvis talk, I realized that he is well-versed in current NPS interpretation and education strategy, in the way that only someone who has engaged in agency discussions over a long period of time would be.

Still discussing education, Jarvis challenged the agency to embrace technology, and acknowledged that we have a way to go when it comes to removing technological barriers. To illustrate this point, Jarvis recounted his own participation in the study trips of the Second Century Committee, during one of which a park had to use the Skype capability of a friends’ group to demonstrate an innovative education program, because parks don’t have access to Skype directly. Jarvis also commended a program I’d not previously heard of called the “teacher-ranger-teacher program.” (If you’re interested, follow this link to one successful example of this program from Gateway National Recreation Area: http://www.nps.gov/gate/forteachers/index.htm.)

Jarvis next spoke about relevance, and finally workforce. “Workforce” might at seem at first glance the least relevant topic for retirees, but the fact that this Rendezvous hosted at least two dozen CNPSR members as well as student interns and current employees suggests that retirees already serve as mentors to prospective and new hires, at least within the formal structure of the ANPR. As has been the case for the past several decades, the NPS still lacks and seeks to increase workforce diversity.

As a former interpreter who has been out of touch with the Service for a few years, the most intriguing part of the talk for me was Jarvis’s message about relevancy. Making interpretive programs and materials relevant to your audience is one of Freeman Tilden’s interpretive principles, of course, and the idea is far from new for educators. Still, the concept of “relevance,” like that of “meaning,” is protean and highly subjective. “Pertinent to, or bearing a connection with, the matter at hand” says my American Heritage Fourth Edition. But what exactly is “the matter at hand?”

The NPS interpretive development program partially addresses this inherent subjectivity by encouraging parks to capitalize on the more universal concepts contained within their parks’ stories and use these to help audiences connect with park resources. Certain assumptions are made: that everyone, of no matter what cultural background, will be interested in and can be personally reached with certain large, abstract concepts such as money, religion, love, family, war, and so on. The universality of a “universal concept” can only be posited, never proven. Yet, much effective interpretation is based on this fundamental starting point: that most people are wired to care about universal concepts.

Back to Jarvis’s comments though: while implicitly including all NPS fields, he actually cited his experience with managers. He said that about 90% of the approximately 200 candidates he’d interviewed for superintendent positions during his career had brought up relevance.

The first step in “increasing parks’ relevance to people” is to identify the audience. Jarvis identifies the audience for the NPS simply as all Americans. He recounted his own role in ensuring that Ken Burns was aware of the significant contributions of activists, scientists, and park supporters who were minorities so that Americans of all backgrounds could see role models in the Service. The director also emphasizes the need to make parks relevant to young people. Inevitably, discussions of relevancy lead to considerations of new technology.

As I listened, I scrambled to try to fit what Jarvis was saying and his examples within the framework of my own thoughts. Since this part of Jarvis’s talk was most provocative for me, I thought it would be useful here to show how his comments interacted with the loose and evolving paradigm I’ve formed to date on this subject. To be clear, the next five paragraphs sketch some of my thoughts on the matter, not Jarvis’s words at the conference.

It behooves all educators to understand and embrace the educational applications that come with new technology, as in Jarvis’s previous example of using Skype for a park educational outreach program. If we use technology creatively to communicate the NPS mission, we make ourselves relevant to (or at least conversant with) the contemporary social environment.

Still, we have to avoid confusing the means with the ends, currency with significance, novelty with worth. The NPS is not immune to making this most human kind of error. For example, halfway through Bush’s second term, a revision of NPS management policies was sent out to the field for review. What struck me most vividly about that draft document was its frequent mention of the idea that parks had to be open to recreational use involving “new technology.” This oft-repeated but ill-defined phrase seemed to stand in for snowmobiles, ATVs, and Jet-skis. From a mission-centered point of view, any kind of visitor use being newly considered for a park, regardless of whether it’s high-, low-, new-, old-, or no-tech, should be evaluated based on its potential to preserve or impair the resource. A park resource or another visitor’s experience can be damaged as easily with a hammer, a horse, a snowmobile, or a clothing-optional sunbathing area.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan wrote and theorized about the then relatively newly-available mass media such as television. To support his famous claim that “the message is the medium,” McLuhan wrote:

The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the railway functioned in a tropical or northern environment, and is quite independent of the freight or content of the railway medium. (Understanding Media, N. Y., 1964, p. 8)

With due respect, the NPS in particular would do well to question McLuhan’s assertion. The message is a different thing than the medium used to convey it, in the same way that the work of art is not the same as the artist. Further, the core message of all national parks is our preservation mission. The individual meanings inherent in various national park units are tied to the real people, events, and things located (or once located) in those places.

McLuhan argues that the railway “accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions.” We can say the same of any of today’s immediate-gratification tools such as cell phones, personal computers, the internet, and digital cameras. These tools have expanded the world of human communications and have gradually facilitated changes in the social norms for public behavior (manners). Completely hooked-in people have a new kind of existence in which one is constantly and continuously available or “on call,” even if it is at the expense of being able to fully appreciate one’s present company or setting. So, grandmothers hike with their cell phones on, in case their children or grandchildren need to talk to them. Two people sitting at dinner may both be looking at their respective Blackberries, not at each other. Gradually, similar scenes and situations have become commonplace and unremarkable in our affluent Western societies. We can confidently say that communications have been “accelerated and enlarged in scale,” but it’s trickier to assess the qualitative elements of those communications. In other words, how is comprehension affected? Further, how are people themselves changing? Certain sources have asserted that people are undergoing fundamental changes in their behavior or in their nature due to using such devices, but personally I’m not sure that social science has caught up with the behavioral changes. For example, we say anecdotally that kids have ever-shorter attention spans (and this was said of my childhood generation too); that they don’t learn to enjoy reading or don’t read as deeply because they read online; that they have a different understanding of personal privacy than their elders; that they have higher tolerance for interruptions and changes of focus. Whether these observed changes are real and permanent, or only perceived and situational, these are some of the assumptions that may play into the myriad occasions when the NPS must “know its audiences.”

Jarvis presented an open attitude toward people’s use of technology in general. He gave a brief personal example of taking occasional hikes with very connected young friends, commenting that they sometimes watch sports events on their IPhones while they hike. Jarvis observed this distraction from the here and now, of course, but apparently didn’t attempt to check the kids’ “checking in.” Rather, the gist of his anecdote was that he was simply glad they were hiking.

Jarvis seemed to suggest that the NPS will fail to capture new generations if it ignores what they like.

How do we respond to a visitor turning away from a place and tuning into a device? Better, how can we be proactive, rather than reactive, to using new technology to enhance park visits? There will be different answers for different audiences depending on why they are visiting in the first place. I think we have to try a lot of different things.

I also think we have to be very deeply convinced ourselves that parks offer visitors unique resources and experiences that they just can’t have virtually. Without decrying Wii (and similar ways of playing), the NPS can be the anti-Wii. It is not ideal to have to introduce experiences such as camping and hiking and other ways of enjoying wilderness through back-formation, but it may be the situation we have to navigate sometimes.

Jarvis made a few other points about relevancy. He mentioned that the Administration is looking to the NPS to provide jobs for young people. If this means fuller complements of seasonal and temporary staff than in recent seasons, the prospect for older employees to learn about new technology (while they help the new hires acquire content proficiency) looks good for the near future.

Another way to help the Service find more paths to relevancy see the broader picture of what the National Park System is. Just as he had earlier encouraged us to see park ecology in terms of larger ecosystems and landscapes, he here encouraged us to see parks in terms of their greater communities, and to embrace NPS programs like Rivers and Trails and Heritage Areas, so that people can take even more pride in nationally significant features that already exist within their local communities.

Jarvis concluded his comments with a challenge to the ANPR to take the iconic image of the park ranger and help advance him or her into the future. I don’t know what that ranger looks like. She’ll surely use a cell-phone and a GPS unit to help find and rescue endangered visitors, but she may also still lead hikes and teach people to tell the time of day with the sun. And while a tool to conduct instant DNA analysis of field samples may soon be on hand, the 21st century ranger may still find value in practicing and teaching others how to use a field key. After all, as Jarvis commented that day, we don’t force people to wear wool. I hope for the sake of today’s rangers he really means it about the wool, by the way. I hope we can dress the 21st century rangers in fleece and microfiber and toss those mostly wool dress uniforms based on masculine paramilitary patterns. But that discussion is for another day.