PT 
They all come from different backgrounds. They are artists, tour guides and museum staff. They work with artistic, archaeological and natural heritage, and eager and enthusiastic souls. They use experimental dialogic and unidirectional techniques to interpret the heritage in their care. Our colleagues came to speak, share, and inspire one another, in conversations structured around six pressing issues. But those issues, while decisive to prompt conversation, were not what animated it. The attitudes towards heritage interpretation and museum mediation were. Listening to them, two fundamental attributes could be found in all those present that day: the unwavering commitment to the respectful preservation and valorisation of the heritage in their care, and the socially engaged desire to serve the needs of the people who come to meet that heritage. Listening to them, we also found the rich diversity with which they give shape to these principles.
We found gardeners, those who see the potential in every object for stories to flourish and who see the power in every person to expand their worldview, those that plant seeds even when they will not see them bloom.
We found butterfly catchers, ones that see multiple perspectives, and infinite possibilities, fluttering in that uncanny expanse between the eye of the beholder and the object of contemplation, ones that come with their nets ready and set, and show us that it is possible to catch these wandering slivers of understanding to all our delights.
We met fishermen, those who venture out on the moving waters, trying to catch these fast and agile, furiously animated things: the attention of visitors, the secrets of objects.
It is for people in this extraordinary gamut that the TEHIC project is designing a curriculum. It is for us and those like us. A curriculum that recognizes that different attitudes and attributes will make use of different strategies and tools. All of us have, to some degree, found our voices as mediators, interpreters, and storytellers. But we lacked that wonderful place of playful experimentation that is often found in education. A curriculum that can share multiple skills with its students, and incentivize them to play, to experiment, to boldly go wherever these instruments can take them, can fundamentally reshape the diversity in our sector. The students that test these methods and tools without the pressures of financial sustainability, or the compromise with political agendas, will learn to use them to their fullest range of possibilities. They will cheerfully try new arrangements and compositions from diverse and sometimes "incompatible" perspectives, enriching our communities with marvellous new ways of engagement. Ones capable of stealing those irresistible words from the mouth of Carrol's little Alice: «Curiouser and curiouser!».
(Text written by Ivo Oosterbeek on the occasion of the Museum Mediation and Heritage Interpretation Conference - April 2024, and produced within the framework of the TEHIC project: https://tehic.eu/)
Photo caption: Entomological box from the insect collection of the National Museum of Natural History and Science (CM-Caixa 160), (National Museum of Natural History and Science - Portugal).