if you’re visiting Berlin, you need to know its historical background. There have been many moments of great triumph, great progress and also difficult periods in city’s history. When you’re a tour guide, a certain degree of respect, empathy, and a bit of well informed perspective on sensitive historical topics is crucial. This blog post looks at how you can handle sensitive historical topics during your Berlin tour so your audience involves engaging conversation, but also keep them emotionally in the clear.
1. Learn First Up to Enhance Your Learning Ability
Instead of jumping to lead a tour after just arriving, take some time to do in depth research and education on the particular historical topic you want to discuss. But it also helps you to make sense of the context surrounding that sensitive event when giving you a more comprehensive and accurate narrative. Get multiple views of things by reading books, articles and historical accounts.
Tip:
Collect together a curated list of reliable sources such as academic texts, personal testimonies and documentaries that will further your knowledge on the subject.
2. Set up Trust and Set Expectations
The first thing to do when you are bringing up sensitive topics or you need to have open dialogue is to build trust. When people show up, set the expectation that you’re going to be discussing some sensitive historical events. Direct them to ask questions and to share their feelings, and you’ll let them know that you intend to maintain a respectful and inclusive environment.
Tip:
Make sure to put emphasis that we all have different experiences and different emotions and we should come into the conversation with an open mind, with empathy.
3. Present Multiple Perspectives
That historical events are often complex and involve different perspectives and interpretations. Explain your position without being negative or negative. They are all so different, and it is okay to acknowledge that and encourage participants to look at things from a different angle. This invites thinking, encouraging the discussion among tour group participants.
Tip:
Write offering contrasting accounts, from historians, scholars, or people who were eye witnesses to the events, to light up the tensions and difficulties in contextualising delicate historical concerns.
4. Foster Empathy and Emotional Understanding
Tour participants can be sensitive to historical events. Give them empathy by ‘human’ the stories and participants. Include personal narrative, anecdote or regular people’s account about historical events. This emotional connection creates understanding deeper than we normally have about the messiness of our history.
Tip:
Make people feel those empathetic responses and connect more deeply to the past with photographs, letters or personal items.
5. Encourage Reflection and Critical Thinking
If you are a tour guide, help your participants muse about the past and think critically. Create open ended questions that encourage thought provoking responses and get participants to think about how what have been discussed has implications. The approach of the students encourages them to think deeper into the matter, and form their own version based on the inputs they find.
Tip:
Use group discussions or journaling activities to get participants to think about things for themselves in a personal reflection and create deeper thinking.
6. Provide Resources for Further Exploration
Make sure participants have resources to go deeper into the topics on the tour. Give a compiled list of books, websites, or museums in which they can continue their exploration and understand what happened on their own terms over sensitive historical events.
Tip:
Keep a brief synopsis or review to give participants a clue as to what resources to pick which will align with their interest or preferred perspectives.
Final Thoughts
To get through historical topics on a Berlin tour you have to plan carefully, be empathic and be dedicated to a balanced opinion. Through knowledge, trust, offering many perspectives, cultivating empathy, reflecting and further resources, you set up a tour that is meaningful and enlightening for your tour participants. But remember that everyone is learning and the point is to learn the history, to listen to difficult history, and to encourage an open discussion that leads to a more inclusive, more empathetic society.
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