Tour Guiding in Contentious Times: Designing Conversations, Not Just Commentary

About this episode

This episode discusses the challenges of addressing difficult topics in tour guiding, featuring insights from educator Mike Fishback.

This is an episode all about the hard stuff. Politics. Disagreement on tour. Tour sites where the truth itself is in debate. Confronting places with complicated, dark histories. Most of the advice out there is: avoid this stuff at all costs. People just want to have fun, they're on vacation. Guides should stick to the script and make sure they don't say something that upsets the guests. I'm not here as a tour guide to shove my opinions down everyone's throats. Can't we all just get along? Can't we just keep the discourse civil? Our guest this week, Mike Fishback , is a middle-school humanities educator and curriculum designer who thinks this instinct is exactly the problem. "Civil discourse" isn't about keeping things polite — it's about strategies for engaging with and managing disagreement and difficulty in learning situations, like a tour. Mike learned through experience that it's unwise to sit back, cross your fingers, and hope you don't upset a guest. That there are powerful ways to lean into difficult topics that make the whole experience more meaningful — intentionally creating dialogue through artful questioning and participatory techniques. And he has the educational…

People in this episode

Host: Tourpreneur

Guest: Mike Fishback

Topics covered

• tour guiding
• politics
• civil discourse
• education
• difficult conversations

Keywords

• tour guiding
• politics
• disagreement
• civil discourse
• educational frameworks

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