Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes
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Wageningen University and Research Centre Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes A Tour Guide Perspective Thesis code: Date: 11/10/2010 Saskia Janet Leenders Registration nr.82022650606 Examiners: I. Ateljevic & M. Duineveld Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes Transformative tour guiding: exploring old and new recipes Saskia Janet Leenders Wageningen University and Research Centre Wageningen, The Netherlands 2010, October ii Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes FOREWORD Hereby I present to you my thesis on transformative tour guiding. The path of ‘walking my thesis’ was a big adventure for me, and the first thing that pops up when I hear ‘thesis’ is: STAY WITH THE PROCESS! So here is a short version of the story behind this piece of paper. Inspired by Irena Ateljevic on Trans Modernity and by Paulo Freire on Transformative Education, I wanted to change my own practice as a tour guide towards facilitating transformative ways of doing and being with the aim of developing a critical consciousness and shifting towards values of transmodernity . Why did I feel the need to do this? I will illustrate this by quoting myself in a letter I wrote to Theodore Zeldin: ‘I believe tour guiding, as it is facilitated at this moment, is rather boring: going to places and attractions, not having enough time to meet people to go beyond this empty meeting ground. So I am experimenting with methods to make people have conversations with one another, to interact, connect and possibly change their understanding of ‘the other’ and of themselves and to share’. In other words: I think that in tourism there is a great potential to get to a higher level of consciousness and to learn and reflect on own habits, practices and attitudes, to meet people to get connected and share! For this, people need to be actively participating in an intercultural meeting ground. However, from my previous experience as a guide, the way tourist move through the potential learning environment is limited in the ability to generate such processes, because the focus is somewhere else. Moreover, I believe that the guide in a guided tour can add extra value by facilitating this learning experience. Therefore, in July 2009, I went to South Korea with the idea of experimenting to find a new method for transformative tour guiding while guiding tours for Shilla Travel1. I wanted to create a platform for dialogue between world cultures in between the program of the tours. After struggling as a tour guide for Shilla Travel for 2 months, I had guided 3 tours (around 40 people) and I felt like I failed my research completely: I didn’t succeed in creating a meeting ground between locals and the tourists in between that busy schedule that I had to follow. I 1 Shilla Travel is a Dutch/Korean based tour operator that specializes in tours throughout North and South Korea iii Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes was exhausted by continuously being under pressure of the job, and at the same time criticizing its practice and trying to figure out how to organize possible ways to change it. So, as a guide for Shilla Travel, I didn’t manage to transform my ways of guiding the groups. I started to doubt my ideas. Maybe my ideas were unrealistic? I wanted my research to be dramatic and innovative. Dramatic in the way that it would really change something within people; and innovative because I had the idea I had to find a method that was not there yet. Otherwise it was not worth doing research for, right? On top of this, Shilla Travel went bankrupt in the end of August 2009. Now my research was doomed, I thought… Yet, this gave me the opportunity to experiment with setting up a meeting ground between locals and tourists outside of the guiding structures. I went to China and Laos together with Arjaan, my boyfriend, and we managed to facilitate 2 meeting ground sessions, in cooperation with local organizations. Back in the Netherlands, I organized another workshop in cooperation with Otherwise. On top of that, I had great conversations with other guides about current practices. All very valuable learning experiences; for research but also personally! Throughout the process of rethinking and re- shifting my research, I lost some time, and gained so much experience to ‘stay with the process!’ Overall, the thesis project was a challenging and valuable learning experience. It was a chance to gain new insights on tour guiding and generally understand the bigger socio- cultural forces in society that influence the practice. Although it was a tough process, it helped me in gaining insight on myself; my skills, my fears, my dreams, my traps, my passions. Actually this was quite a transformational experience in itself by learning and soaking up wisdoms and insights that transformed my own worldview and daily routines. Also, I am inspired for future projects to put my academic knowledge into practice. Throughout the process I struggled with my academic self. Yet, I do have the feeling I developed my academic skills further; to be critical reflexive, to analyze and write, and to apply all kinds of difficult theories to tour guiding and to put this into action. Particularly the putting it into action is very challenging and this is exactly what I will focus on after this piece of ‘think’ work. This thesis is not meant to represent ‘the truth’; it rather is a moment of reflection on the practice of tour guiding. I hope it will broaden the way of thinking about tour guiding, and iv Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes that it will give inspiration to those in the field of facilitating change and learning experiences. Thus, this thesis is a beginning and not an end. Immense gratitude for all those beautiful people who guided me in this process: Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! Thank you Irena for staying with me in the process; thank you for all the love that you gave me that supported me so much; and thank you for letting me dream- you are my mother of dreams: I have developed new feathers, which give me wings to fly away with a Master degree in my pocket! Thank you Arjaan for all your love; thank you for doing a thesis boot camp together and to edit my thesis; thank you for the beautiful conversations; thank you of walking the path of facilitating meeting grounds in Laos and China with me! Thank you Dawn, Hean, Bob, Hyejin, Don; Thank you inspirational authors, friends, colleagues, Phoenix Arbor, Otherwise, roomies, Rasa, university, great projects, meditation classes, musicians! And thank you Paul and Lida, my parents, for supporting me in my studies. v Transformative Tour Guiding: Exploring Old and New Recipes CONTENTS Foreword ............................................................................................................................. iii Executive Summary .............................................................................................................. ix Chapter 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Broader socio-cultural context and the role of tourism ................................................ 2 1.1.1 Dehumanizing capitalism: To have or to be? ......................................................... 2 1.1.2 The great promise of happiness through unlimited progress: the illusion of modernity ..................................................................................................................... 5 1.1.3 Trans modernity: value shift ................................................................................. 7 1.1.4 Tourism as a reflection of society .......................................................................... 9 1.1.5 Trans-modern potential of tourism ..................................................................... 11 1.1.6 Tour Guides as possible facilitators of transition ................................................. 12 1.2 Empirical context ....................................................................................................... 13 1.3 Research aims............................................................................................................ 14 1.3.1 Aims ................................................................................................................... 14 1.3.3 Methodology in a nutshell .................................................................................. 15 Outline ............................................................................................................................ 15 Chapter 2 Theoretical Framework ....................................................................................... 16 2.1 Modern (mass) tourism ............................................................................................. 16 2.1.1 Dehumanized interaction .................................................................................... 16 2.1.2 Tourism Bubbles ................................................................................................. 18 2.1.3 problemetizing the Predominantly visual meeting grounds ................................. 19 2.2 Transformation Potentialities in Tourism ................................................................... 20 2.2.1 Tourism Meeting grounds: intercultural learning ................................................ 20 2.2.3 Away from home: space for reflection and discovering new ways of being.......... 22