Learning About Learning in Tourism: Indigenous Guide Perspectives on Their Personal and Professional Development

Abstract

This empirically based article examines guides’ knowledge and skills acquisition. Using two cultural tourism attractions in New Zealand as field sites, the focus is on guides in cultural tourism contexts. Twenty-one semistructured in-depth interviews with guides and managers were conducted and analyzed using a social constructivist perspective. This article is thus among the first to add the voices of (Indigenous) guides to the discussions of guide knowledge acquisition and learning. The relevance of previous personal experience of guides, conceptualized as informal experiential (practice-based) learning and lifelong learning, is identified as critical in guided tour content selection and delivery, as well as in engagement with participants of a guided tour experience. Implications address power relationships, ownership of information and stories, and credibility of a message in (Indigenous) cultural tourism; the need to focus on recruitment of guides, and a call for perceiving guides as humans with a sophisticated, demanding, interpersonal role.