Tour Guides at Memorial Sites and Holocaust Museums

In this volume, contributors reflect on how to teach and mediate difficult history from the perspectives of guides. Too often, their activities are undervalued and taken for granted. Guides represent an important, often forgotten group of educators. This volume takes a global view on guiding at memorial sites and museums in Europe, North America, and South Africa. The contributors to this volume show from different research traditions that it is worth understanding more about the guides’ personal interests, their motivations, and their concept of guiding. Authors apply methodologies from the social sciences to describe the guides’ point of view. Complementing the various approaches in tour guide research, a detailed linguistic analysis sheds light on a survivor’s testimony echoed in the guides’ language. The studies gathered in this volume open up an orientation for further approaches to tour guiding based on and centered around “authentic” materials from guides.
The book gives a close look at tour guides at places of difficult history. For this purpose, experts, doing empirical research from all over the world working in this field, present their results. In this way, an impression of the activity of the guides will be given from two perspectives: On the one hand, the focus is on questions of content: What challenges are the guides facings? On the other hand, the methodological procedures to be used in the field of tour guides have to be considered: Why do qualitative studies in particular dominate the field?